“It’ll do,” Archie said. He looked at Bone. “Come help me.”
They moved back through the darkness to the Darcy farmhouse. A single kitchen lantern was burning, and Bone navigated through a gloom of shadows. “Here,” Archie said tonelessly. He put his hands under Paul Darcy’s shoulders. Bone took the feet, spreading the legs until he was able to grasp the body under the knees. This was death, all right. Always the same, Bone thought, that rag-doll pout, as if the farmer were holding his breath to protest the injustice of it. Bone looked without curiosity at the broad red stain across Darcy’s midsection. They lifted up the body and carried it into the wheatfield, to the hole Bone had gouged there.
The body looked up at them from the hole. Archie, breathing in gasps, poured a spadeful of earth over Darcy’s face, as if he could not bear that silent recrimination. There was something prudish in the gesture, and Archie straightened hastily, shaking his head. “One more,” he said.
This one was more difficult even for Bone. The Darcy woman lay at the opposite end of the kitchen, spreadeagled next to the iron stove (the stove Deacon had called a “puffin’ belly”), and though her wound was similar to her husband’s the expression on her face was even more reproachful. Maybe the indignity was worse for a woman: this nasty business of lifting and burying. By the time they reached the grave Archie was weeping again, a dry weeping that seemed to come from deep inside the cavity of his chest. Mrs. Darcy lay in the shallow hole in her yellow print dress, and Bone saw that the rain had made her expression quizzical, as if she were surprised to be here, staring so fixedly up at the night. Bone suppressed an urge to apologize.
“Bury ’em,” Archie said. He wiped his hands on his pants. “Bury ’em fast as you can.”
Bone drove his shovel into the dirt pile: chuff. It was easier work than the digging had been.
Now the bunkroom was full of light. Deacon was there, filling up his kitbag and Archie’s with oddments from the Darcy household: forks, spoons, canned food. He did not look cheerful exactly Bone thought, but there was a feverish redness to his cheeks, a wildness in his eyes.
“A night’s work,” he was saying. “All in a fucking night’s work. Right, Archie? All in a night’s work—right?”
“For Christ’s sake,” Archie pleaded, “shut up about it.”
Bone stood in the doorway, waiting.
“We move out tonight,” Deacon said. “Find us a train. Moving out, Bone! Find us a train out of here.”
Bone nodded. It was all he had really wanted. He gazed at Deacon hefting his kitbag and wondered for the first time whether these men were really his friends, whether the killing of the Darcys had been, as Deacon insisted, “necessary.” Deacon feeding him in California, Deacon offering him a smoke— that Deacon had smelled trustworthy and Bone had invested his trust accordingly.
This Deacon—literally twitching with nervous energy, his eyes wild with lantern light—smelled very different. There was an air about him of cordite and revenge. He had killed. He had killed with calculation and without mercy. He could do so again.
Deacon motioned to Bone, and the two of them stepped outside for a moment. “This is just between us,” Deacon said, hooking his arm over Bone’s stooped shoulder. “Not that I don’t trust Archie. Don’t get me wrong. He’s my buddy. But he’s a little wild right now—you understand? I got something I want you to hold onto for me, and maybe don’t let Archie know you got it. Understand?”
Bone shrugged.
“Good,” Deacon said hastily, “great,” and he pushed something into the deep pocket of Bone’s blue Navy pea coat.
“Archie!” Deacon yelled. “Time to move out! We want to get down the road before sunup!”
Lingering behind them on the wet road away from the farmhouse, Bone waited until there was a little dawn light and then reached into his pocket and pulled out what Deacon had put there. It was a damp wad of bills, prosaic in his huge calloused hand.
Bone slid the money back into his pocket.
The Calling was louder now, and he listened carefully for the sound of a train.
Chapter Eight
Nancy located Travis on the first chill day of the autumn.
Seasons in Haute Montagne always followed the calendar. Springs were a haste of melting and blossoming; summers declared themselves boldly; autumns hurried toward winters; and winters came down like guillotine blades. She was accustomed to it. The prairie, incising the sky on all horizons, gave up these clinical seasons. But now for the first time Nancy was seriously worried. The adventure was not an adventure any longer. She had lost Travis, and Anna would not tell her why. The cool air and the shedding of the bur oaks seemed full of portents.
She watched the Burack house for a time,- for a time she waited with Anna at the switchman’s hut. Travis did not come to either place.
If he had not left Haute Montagne altogether, she thought, there was only one place he might be.
She put on a heavy cloth coat and took a hunting knife from the attic chest where the relics of her father’s life were stored. She attached the knife to her belt and slipped away from the house. It was an overcast Saturday, and her mother was off at a Baptist Women’s meeting. Fallen leaves pursued her until she was beyond the town, and then there was only the dry prairie grass. She followed the southern bank of the Fresnel toward the railway trestle.
She was frightened, though she tried not to admit it to herself. All her life she had heard stories about railway tramps. That they left encoded marks on people’s doors. That they stole babies. That they would kill you for the money in your pocket. Sometimes, especially these latter years, she had seen such men come into town looking for work. They had seemed less threatening than sad, worn-out, eroded. They wore helplessness about them like a suit of clothes. The church would occasionally feed them, though Nancy’s mother disapproved: “It only encourages them. And the smell!”
Sad. But Nancy did not doubt that they could be dangerous, too. How could such despair not breed anger?
She moved through the empty meadows toward the scabrous iron trestle, burdocks clinging to her skirt. When she saw a faint, line of smoke rising up, she reached inside her coat and closed her fingers on the reassuring whalebone handle of the knife.
It was not a big hobo jungle. Haute Montagne was too far from the big cities, too insignificant a stopover, and too chary a society for that. But there were men who lived here, at least briefly. She saw two huts made of tar paper, tin, and old two-by-fours in the darkness under the trestle. A tiny fire burned fitfully. A few men lay strewn on the ground like sacks of trash, asleep, their limbs at random angles. The sound of the river running came back in echoes from the arch of the railway bridge. She moved as far into that shadowy place as she dared.
“Travis?”
Her voice, too, echoed back.
She thought: He is not here.
But then a shadow stirred in the dark pebbly corner where the trestle met the bank, and Travis stepped forth.
She was relieved that he was not like these other men, some of whom had risen up to stare blankly at her; he was, still, better groomed, better dressed. He looked only down on his luck, not broken. It seemed inconceivable that he could have been living like this… for days, Nancy thought; almost a week since she had left him alone at the switchman’s shack.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” he said.
He had lost weight. He stood before her like a pillar of stone.