“And your father?” she asked. She looked after the rider on the horse, his dark shape moving through the gray light above, the sheep moving all around him, turned away as if the horse itself were a boat breaking through the waves. “He would shoot them?”
“He will go out and give the sheep one last look before it is full dark,” the son said. He had begun to clean the big pot out and to wash it with a bit of water and a cloth. “He is a herder. He has always been a herder. To take away his herd is to end his life. You understand?” He went on washing. When he looked up at Mary May again, he asked, “Your brother is a believer?”
“I don’t know if he is or if he isn’t,” she said. “I don’t know him anymore. I guess I haven’t known him for a while.”
“We hear things sometimes,” the boy said. “We hear their chanting, or their singing. We hear voices in the woods and sometimes we see their fires. Some are believers,” he said. “Others are less so. And it’s these that always have it the hardest for what they think they are entering is a world defined by the mercy of God, but the place they have come is not a place of God, but a place of sinners and the word of The Father has little bearing on God, and instead The Father’s words are used to enslave them.”
She stood watching him and then she turned to look to where his own father was rounding the sheep in the high pasture lands above. When she turned back to the boy, she said, “You’re a knowledgeable kid.”
He finished with the pot then set it aside and started in on the bowls and the big ladle they had used for serving. “Just because we live out here does not mean we are blind to what is going on in town, and in all the corners of this county. Sometimes it is the distance itself, either physical or emotional, that lets you see with the most clarity.”
THEY HAD STOPPED AT THE FOOT OF THE RIDGE WHEN THE DARK had come and they had eaten from the supplies Will had packed. They made a small fire and Will watched the twigs and small bits of wood fall away within the dancing heat while Lonny rolled a cigarette and told Will that he hoped tomorrow they would find her.
Will said he hoped so, too. But that he was unsure what good it would do her or do the church to bring her in. “She is not a believer,” Will said. “Her family has always hated the church and I don’t see how bringing her in would change that.”
“It is better to have her under control than to have her loose out there,” Lonny said. He lit the cigarette and sat smoking. “She was talking to the sheriff before all this.”
“What was she saying to him?”
“Nothing of any truth,” Lonny said. “But she is casting doubt upon The Father and upon the church and I think that alone is something John cannot stand about her.”
“I knew her as a kid,” Will said. “She was strong-willed even then. I don’t expect she’s changed much since.”
“We will see,” Lonny said. He smoked the cigarette and looked in on the flames, then when he was done he flicked the cigarette away into the fire. Five minutes later he was asleep.
Will watched the fire until it was only an incandescent flicker of coal there at the bottom of the pit he had constructed from loose stones he’d found nearby. He thought of the bear cub and how he had wanted to save it, but that in the end he had not been able to.
That night for the first time in a long time he dreamt of his daughter. She had always liked him to sit up by her bed and she would not go to sleep unless he was there next to her. When she had been young she would wake up screaming if she found the chair empty and him not there. Will dreamt of her there in bed with her eyes closed but her mind still wide awake.
“You won’t leave me?” she said.
“No. I’m going to sit right here.”
“Even when I fall asleep you’ll be right there?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m going to be right here. I’m going to be looking over you and I’ll never leave you.”
“What about Mamma?” she asked.
“What about her?”
“Who is looking over her?”
“I am. I am watching over both of you.”
“Even while you’re watching over me?”
“Yes,” he said. He observed her for a while. He listened to her breathing. He heard the way her breath changed as she went to sleep. He was sitting in the old room that had been hers, sitting in the house that had been his and his wife’s and that had sat up above on the bluff. And in the dream, he could see out on the landscape through the bedroom window and there was a golden and full character to the land that seemed to him like the dry wheat of a field seen just before the harvest.
He got up from the chair and went out of the room and closed the door. He stopped for a moment, knowing his daughter was in there and that she was safe and that she was alive. Now he went and looked for his wife, but he could not find her. He stood in the kitchen and looked out on the same field. It was dark now, nothing to see but his own reflection in the glass and it seemed to him that the house had changed and that much was missing in the reflected glass of the world behind him.
When he turned from the window he heard his daughter’s piercing scream, calling for him, calling for him to come and get her like he had done when she was a little girl and she would wake up startled to find herself alone.
He was at her door as if he had simply found it waiting there but each time he turned the knob it would not unlock and he could hear her screaming for him, asking where he was, asking for him to come and find her. He kept turning the knob in his hand and it was doing nothing and he knew without a doubt that something horrible was happening that he could not stop, that even in his home there was nothing he could do to help her.
He woke with a start, and he could not stop coughing. It was still an hour before the dawn would come, but he could see the light building in the east. He held a hand to his mouth and racked his lungs and felt something stir within him and come loose. He spit it from his mouth and sat staring at it. Mucus, dark and evil looking there on the ground like some Precambrian life form brought forth from within the mud.
After an hour he was still awake, just lying there watching above as the sun chased the last remaining stars from out of the sky. On the ground beside him, dark as a pool of tar was the blackened and drying blood of an ulcer or some other wickedness he had brought up from somewhere deep inside.
THE BOY WOKE HER IN THE MORNING WITH A HAND HELD OUT across her shoulder and as she opened her eyes he backed away toward the fire and he sat again and stirred whatever it was he had been making there in the pot. His father sat beside him, both of them there like they had never left, still wearing the same clothes and sitting in the same place.
“Estabas hablando,” the father said.
She shook her head to show she did not understand then looked toward the boy and waited.
“You were talking in your sleep,” the boy said. Using the ladle, he scooped dark liquid from within the pot then put it in a bowl and handed it to her. He was back at the fire again when she looked up. She sniffed the bowl, blew on it then put the liquid to her lips and tasted it. “Coffee?” she said. “Gracias.”
“De nada,” the father said. The boy nodded, dipping the ladle again and serving his father before he served himself.
When she was finished with the bowl she could see the loose grinds at the bottom and she thought about the cowboy stories the old ones who came into the bar used to tell about reading the grinds to tell the future. And though she stared down for a minute or more she could not tell a thing from what she saw. She rose, tipping the bowl over and using her fingers to clean out the grinds.
The bruise was still there on her thigh when she squatted down within the trees. She ran her hand across it, pressing against it to feel the tenderness of the skin. It was purple, going blue to yellow at the edges, and when she was done she lifted her pants and came out from under the trees buttoning up her jeans.