"He used to smack my mother around," Jeannie said. "Me too. Even after my mom threw him out and they got divorced, he used to show up drunk sometimes and try to make her . . . do stuff."
I nodded.
"She ever call the cops?" I said.
Jeannie shook her head.
"She was too embarrassed," Jeannie said.
"Too bad you didn't tell me more about it," I said.
"You're a kid, what were you going to do?" Jeannie said.
"I'da told my father," I said. "And my uncles."
"They would have done something?"
"Yes," I said.
The rain kept coming as we walked. It was kind of amazing how you adjust to stuff. We were wet through and had been wet through for so long that we didn't pay much attention to it anymore.
"When we get out of the woods," Jeannie said, "are we going to tell people what happened?"
"Not until we talk with my father and my uncles," I said.
"So what do we tell people?"
"That we got lost in the woods," I said.
"But you're going to tell your father the truth," Jeannie said.
"And my uncles. They'll know what to do."
"How do you know that?" Jeannie said.
"They always know what to do," I said.
"They do? My mom never does," Jeannie said.
Pearl had tired of the woods and was now trotting along the tracks in front of us. Jeannie put her hand on my arm, and we stopped for a moment. She looked straight at me.
"You saved me," she said.
I nodded.
"You knew what to do," she said.
"Didn't have a bunch of choices," I said.
In front of us, Pearl stopped suddenly and raised her head and began to sniff the air. I walked to where she stood and sniffed. There was a smell. I sniffed some more.
Someone was frying bacon. I heard a car horn. The three of us went on down the tracks, around a curve, and there was a town.
Chapter 23
"What did your father say?" Susan asked me.
"Actually it was my uncle Cash that came to get us," I said. "We were about twenty miles downriver, and we told him what happened on the ride home."
"And what did Uncle Cash say?"
"Not much. He never had all that much to say anyway."
"Did he say anything?"
"He said, âSounds like you done pretty good. We'll talk with your father about it.' "
"Your father was the man?" Susan said.
"It was mostly like a house with four equals in it," I said.
"Including you."
"Yeah," I said, "but in retrospect, I guess my father was a little more equal."
"And you?" Susan said.
"Maybe a little less, until I was older."
"They must have been out of their minds with worry," Susan said.
"Probably, though I gotta say they didn't mention it."
"So what was your father's reaction when you got home?"
"Mostly like Cash's, Patrick too. They both said it sounded like I'd done what I had to do and done it well."
"That must have made you feel good."
I nodded.
"Did," I said.
"How about Jeannie?"
"My uncle Cash told her that she could think of us as family and anytime she needed help come to one of us. Patrick and my father said that was so."
"And?" Susan said.
"And she started to cry."
Susan nodded.
"Finally," she said, "someone to depend on. Must have felt good for her."
A couple of pigeons came to where we sat on the bench and stood giving us the beady eye. We had no food to give them. So after a long accusa tory moment, they waddled to the next bench.
"Did you know," Susan said, "in certain tribal cultures of the early Middle Ages, the child of a princess was raised by her brothers?"
"I didn't know that," I said. "Why did they do that?"
"Something about keeping the question of bloodline in-house, so to speak," Susan said.
"A little-known fact," I said.
"I have a PhD from Harvard," Susan said. "I know many of them."
"All of them as useful as that?" I said.
"Oh, heavens no," Susan said. "But I do have a question."
"Of course you do," I said. "You're a shrink."
"How did you feel?" she said.
"Me?"
"You. You were fourteen years old and you'd just killed a man."
"At the time, I didn't know quite how I felt," I said. "I'm not sure I do now."
Chapter 24
Cash drove Jeannie home. I took a shower and put on clean clothes. There were biscuits left over from breakfast. My father cooked up some antelope steaks and fried some green tomatoes. When Cash came back, we sat down to supper at the kitchen table.
"She got her story straight?" my father said.
"Yeah," Cash said. "Tell it just like it happened until the bridge. They hid on the bridge, he went on past them downriver. Don't know where he is."
"Work for you?" Patrick said to me.
I nodded.
I said, "I did kill him, though, didn't I?"
Patrick and Cash both looked at my father.
"You made it easier for him to kill himself," my father said. "But you didn't make him kidnap Jeannie, or beat her, and you didn't make him chase you down the river with a bowie knife. And you didn't require him to do it drunk, understand?"
"So why not just tell the whole truth?"
"It saves some trouble if we don't," my father said. "I told you once that there was right and wrong and there was also the law. Law can't always be about right and wrong. Sometimes the law gotta do what the law is required to do. I know and you know and Patrick knows and Cash knows and Jeannie knows that what you done was not only right, it was . . ."
He mulled his word choice for a minute.
"It was goddamned heroic," he said. "But the law can't just know things. It has to decide them in a legal way. They got to investigate. They got to talk about it in the DA's office. Maybe they have to talk about it in court. Things drag on. They finally decide that what you done was self-defense, and they leave you be. And we're right where we are now. Except in the meantime we all been annoyed at some length."
"Why does it have to be that way?" I said.
" 'Cause not everybody agrees on what's right," Cash said.
"Luke Haden probably thought he was right," Patrick said. "If he cared."
"So a . . . country, a state, whatever, gotta have laws to protect us from the people who don't know what's right or don't care," my father said.
We all ate in silence for a while.
"Course that's what I think," my father said. "But you got a right to think different. If you think you need to tell the law everything that happened, and I can't talk you out of it, then I'll go down to the station with you and go the whole way with you, whatever way it goes."
I looked at my uncles.
"A course," Cash said.
"Naturally," Patrick said.
"But you all think it would be a mistake," I said.
"Never a mistake," Patrick said, "to do what you think is the right thing to do."
My father nodded.
Cash said, "Amen."
"So how can you be sure what you think is right, is right?" I said.
"I don't know," my father said.
"So what do I do?" I said.
My father grinned.
"Best you can," he said.
"I think I got to tell the truth," I said.
My father nodded.
"Okay," he said. "We'll go down tomorrow, talk to Cecil. All of us."
Chapter 25
In the morning my father drove me down to the police station and waited for me outside in the car while I went in to see Cecil Travers.