“Misled you?”
“That’s the law. It’s contract.”
“We shook hands,” the farmer said, looking to his boys. “Drummer, you said a man can’t do without it.”
“It’s the law. The legislature wrote it. We just got to live by it.”
“What? What are we going to do about that plow?”
“Hey now,” Cartwright said, “don’t bounty them foxes. Tan the hides and sell them. You’ll turn a better profit. You get a few more dozen and I’ll come back in the fall.”
“Know how long it’ll take to cure these hides?”
Cartwright said nothing.
“That’s right. You’ll be off down the road and we won’t see you for a year. Hell, two year. You’ll come back when you feel like it. Where will we be? I’m tired of this ground working me, I’m ready to work it. You said it yourself.”
The nine-fingered boy said, “What’s this?”
The boy knelt and picked up a folded piece of paper. Cartwright felt the world turn on a pivot. He grew light-headed and loose-limbed, as if he’d just been bled with leeches. The boy peeled the sucker list away from the newspaper clipping. His eyes scanned the lines. Cartwright thought about running, but he didn’t know the way back to the road.
The nine-fingered boy read the words aloud, which listed the name McBride among the county’s daft, drunken, gullible, and insane.
“Says we got an eye for any piece of metal, long as it’s shiny. Drills, reapers. Pine away for it, we will.”
“No better than crows,” his brother said.
Cartwright opened his mouth, then let it shut with a click. He felt weary from the cave, and the years on the road, and his entire body was slick with mud, pant legs heavy as dragnets. He leaned against a sycamore that lorded over the Sinks of Gandy. He could retch.
“Look,” he cried, “I know what it’s like! I’m from here!”
With a crack, the nine-fingered boy slapped a creeping armored caterpillar off his pant leg. “Jesus Christ,” he said, looking down. It was a brilliant green, nearly five inches long. He looked back to Cartwright.
The slug punched Cartwright’s side like a party ballot. The drummer fell against the slippery bark, and the shot patch fluttered against his face, a sulfur burn in his nostrils. Once, when he was young, he’d tasted a bitter pinch of gunpowder and said it tasted like a chimney. His father laughed, clamping a loving paw on the boy’s shoulder, his palm rough as a file. Cartwright threw up a hand and the second shot took his forearm in a hail of bone and the third struck his chin, unhinging the mouth.
When Cartwright fell, he did it watching the light play through clouds on the face of the mountain.
McBride laid the shotgun on the ground and reached for a pipe of tobacco, hand shaking.
The ten-fingered boy asked, “What was that on your leg?”
“Hell if I know.”
The boys turned the dragon-like caterpillar on a stick, its orange spikes waving. They ran their thumbs across them. The spikes were hard as apple-thorns.
“That’s called a Hickory Devil,” McBride said, turning back to the drummer’s body. “Digs into the ground and turns into a big old red moth.”
“Kill it,” one said. “It’ll kill a dog if it eats it.”
Tartly, McBride said, “Don’t. That’s a myth. It won’t hurt nothing.”
It was a lonely place, and they merely covered the drummer in pine boughs, confident that no one would find him and no one would care. They should have known better, for the bears and the foxes broke him apart and scattered him far and near. Rodents gnawed his belt and boot leather for their share of salt. Five years later, a hunter found Cartwright’s brass belt-buckle in the leaves and slipped it into his pocket.
It says something of the quality of the buckle’s manufacture, as well as the hunter’s eye, for it was the fourth week of October and the leaves were a thousand shades of brown, mottled like the skin on a copperhead’s back. Later, some lost boys from Moatstown found part of him but paid it little mind, thinking him a deer because they failed to check the long, lithe bones for hooves or fingers. In twenty years, a bear hunter pried the gold tooth from his jaw and threw the husk to the ground. An old woman of Palatine German stock gave his ribcage a Christian burial after a dog dragged it behind her springhouse. She chanted the verses, murmuring, “Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground. For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” But she was fading herself, near death, and troubled in her mind. Is only his torso in heaven? she wondered. Do his legs dance in hell? She was too frail to go searching for the rest, though his pelvic bone rested near a prominent fork in the road, gathering dry leaves like a crock.
The three Irishmen painted Cartwright’s wagon black and set the smart new plow behind the mule in its traces. With a searing poker, they smeared the blood bays with their own brand. Cartwright would have recognized the sound of crackling flesh, because it sounded like the red-hot horseshoes he dropped hissing into a water barrel in his days as a farrier’s apprentice.
After the day’s excitement, McBride and his boys eased back into the rhythms of planting and sowed their corn. They enjoyed a typical harvest, green spears coming up straight and tasseled in mean if nourishing numbers. They chewed the lining of their cheeks in wonder, but then again, they’d merely completed their task with the Miracle Plow, a quarter of the fields. Next year would be the true test. The earth turned and cooled, and they waited out the long winter like denned bears, wagering on next year’s harvest.
When next harvest came, they would have killed Cartwright all over again. The Miracle Plow had failed to increase their yield by any measure whatsoever, no better than the one it had replaced. When Cartwright’s replacement came down the road three years later, they told him so. He urged on his horses with a grim flick of the traces.
As for the three Irishmen, they never roamed beyond the Sinks of Gandy, they waited each year for the trickle of passenger pigeons, they reposed in the ground with the cave bears. Leaning against the completed fence, each lit a clay pipe, savoring the ache of a day’s labor. McBride and his sons watched a lone red fox jumping in the hayfield, pouncing for mice with devilish glee. The people came to call this place McBride’s Slashings, after the acres they wrestled for dominion, but the names can be forgotten. Trees can reclaim the fields, maps can burn, courthouse deeds can be painted in the wondrous colors of mold.
In the distance, among the frailing waves of grain, the fox’s red tail flickered like the birth of a field-fire. The two young men rose from their haunches, taking up their guns to go out and make it worth something, for from their visitors, they took their lessons.
MATES
THE DEER’S HAUNCH SHIVERED IN THE crosshairs. The hide was winter’s gray, and the air didn’t feel like November. Cold had come early this year, indifferent as the sharpest scythe.
The haunch moved: a doe. Crosshairs swung after.
Revealing the white underthroat that men seldom see, she balanced artfully on hind legs to pluck the wine-dark fruit hanging in the sumac. Her weight tugged off a fist of berries. Each bone-colored limb quivered in the air. Snow sifted down, snow that would be gone by noon.
Sull Mercer eased the.270 into the cleft of his shoulder and took a rest off one knee. His rifle was scoped with a 3x9 Leupold — an expensive piece of equipment — but Sull would have told you it was anything but a luxury. It found the tuck behind the doe’s shoulder, that corridor to heart and lung. When she passed into a notch between shagbarks, a chance would flicker. For three decades now, this rifle had been comfort in his hands — the bolt worn smooth of its checkering, the burled walnut dark with weather and age. A twig popped under his shifting heel. No more than the crack of a finch’s bone.