Groping in the darkness beneath the workbench, he retrieved the kerosene lantern. He stood over his father’s body like a priest blessing the host, unscrewed the cap on the base of the lamp and poured the kerosene over the body, from the shoes up along the torso and over the hands and face and hair, until the lamp was emptied. He moved to the end of the bench and looked up along the body from the feet. He had his cigarette lighter in his hand: he ignited it and extended it forward slowly, holding it before him like a votive candle, and instantly the body was wrapped in a shroud of yellow flames. Wade stumbled backward a few steps and watched the clothing catch fire and the hair and skin glow like gold inside the blue- and-yellow flames: the fire snaked across the oil-stained bench and leapt to the old boards behind it, growling and snapping, and the air darkened with the smoke and filled with the dry sour smell of burning flesh. The back wall of the barn was now burning, with the bench and the body on it a pyre, the flames fed by the wind blowing from behind him — the heat surging in huge noisy waves against his face, forcing him back step by step, closer and closer to the door. And then suddenly Wade was outside the barn, standing in the light, surrounded by fields of glistening snow and the black trees beyond, and above him, endless miles of blue sky, and the sun — a flattened disk, cold and white as infinity.
Wade drove the truck south on Parker Mountain Road, uphill and away from town, out of the valley and away from the darkened old house and the burning barn, drove not fast but at a deliberate speed — to all appearances a man on a civilized mission, wearing a rumpled sport coat and shirt and loosened tie, his face calm, thoughtful, kindly looking, as if he were remembering and humming to himself an old favorite tune.
Wade came over the rise, passed the frozen snow-covered muskeg and pulled in and parked behind Jack Hewitt’s Ford pickup on the left. Up the slope to the right, at the edge of the woods, was LaRiviere’s cabin. Wade got out of the truck and reached in behind him and brought the.30/30 out and slipped the six shells from his pocket into the clip. He chambered the first bullet and checked the safety. There were no tracks leading from the road to the cabin and no smoke from the chimney. Jack’s footprints in the snow went directly from his truck to the old lumber trail, then headed downhill through low scrub and brush in a northeasterly direction.
The deer had long since moved into the deepest woods, far from the roads and houses, beyond the sound of the cars and pickups that still prowled the backwoods lanes and trails and the growl of ten-wheelers changing gears on the long slow rise of the interstate north of Catamount. Alone and in occasional pairs, the animals lay hidden, wide-eyed, ears tensed, motionless in dense stands of mountain ash and tangled knots of hawthorn and alder tucked into cirques and gullies, nearly invisible hollows located below scrabbled cliffs and scree, places too difficult to reach from the road in half a day. The deer lay in alerted peace from dawn to dusk, alarmed and quivering in fear only now and then, when the crack of a rifle shot and its echo drifted uphill on the wind, all the way from the more accessible valleys and overgrown fields below, where a few cold end-of-season hunters walking back from the woods toward their cars in the last remaining hour before sunset grumpily, almost randomly, fired their guns at hallucinated stragglers — an unexpected shadow in a birch grove and a mossy boulder browned in a patch of late afternoon sunlight and a sudden powdery spill of snow tipped from the branch of a pine by an errant breeze.
Though it was cold enough for Wade’s breath to stream from his mouth in a visible cloud, he did not seem to notice the freezing air up here on the mountain, in spite of his light clothing. His jacket was unbuttoned and flapped in the breeze, his tie was unknotted and lay back across his shoulder, and he held his rifle with bare exposed hands loosely in front of him, as if his body were generating ample heat from inside and he were on his way out to sentry duty. Every few steps, as he walked in from the road, he slipped on the rough snow- covered ground, but he seemed not to slow or hesitate a bit because of it and crossed recklessly along the crumpled edge of the frozen muskeg, moved through a spiky grove of silver birches and made his way clumsily in hard slick-soled shoes downhill to the dry riverbed below, a path of boulders and flat rocks that ran away from the road and LaRiviere’s cabin toward a row of spruce trees that blocked his view of the long north slope of the mountain beyond. It was as if his body were being drawn by a powerful external force, like gravity or suction, and to keep from falling he moved in a loose deflected way, ricocheting and careening off rocks and stumps and trash wood, keeping his balance like a broken-field runner by letting his body bounce off the barriers that arose one after the other to stop it.
Way behind him, halfway between the mountaintop and the town, the house remained dark, empty and closed up, and the barn went on burning. The fire had quickly spread up along the back wall to the timbers and into the lofts, igniting the ancient hay and then the remains of the roof. Great clouds of dark smoke billowed against the sky. There was a loud raucous music to the fire, a crackling erratic drumbeat against the steady howl of the wind from the cold air sucked off the snowy overgrown fields and yard surrounding the structure and hurled into the hot dark center. Flames licked across the timbers overhead, racing and leaping from dry roof boards and shakes that one by one let go and fell in scarlet-and-gold chunks to the dirt floor, where they shattered and splashed like coins. And in the roaring center of the inferno, as if carved from anthracite, lay the body of our father, his face a rictus yanked back in a fixed gaping grin. His terrible triumph.
At the line of spruce trees, Wade hesitated a moment, examining the ground. The snow below the trees was thinner than on the old riverbed, and patches of bare ground showed through; he had followed Jack’s footprints this far with ease and now had to search among the rust-colored spruce needles and rocks for the trail. A layer of ash-gray cirrus clouds had moved in quickly from the north, and a sharp breeze had come up, riffling the spruces overhead as he walked slowly, carefully, along the edge of the grove.
And then he saw what he was looking for, a break between the trees, a low broken dead branch and a cigarette butt rubbed out with a boot, and he passed under the trees and came out on the other side, where there was the remains of an overgrown switchbacking lumber road. There was more snow here, and he spotted the footprints at once, leading downhill to the right. It was easy walking, and he moved quickly now, gradually descending for several hundred yards to where the long-unused road bent back on itself and crossed in the opposite direction.
He stopped at the bend and looked down along the slope, over the tops of the trees below — all the way to Lake Minuit in the far distance, white and flat in the dark surrounding forest like a frozen wafer, where he could make out, at the farther shore, a cluster of pastel-colored boxes that was the trailer park. Mountain View Trailer Park — when he lived there he had been able to peer out his kitchen window and see the very spot where he stood now: a pale opening below a dark streak made by the spruce trees, and beyond that the lumpy summit of the mountain itself.