“That right?”
“That’s what I’m saying to you.”
She put her hand to the key and cranked the ignition then sat there with her hands on the steering wheel. The chrome-plated .38 was still on the dash and it vibrated in time with the engine.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to get my brother.”
“Look,” he said. “You’re a smart girl.”
She hated him for saying it like that, as if he knew something better than she did.
He came forward a bit and she raised a hand up the wheel and her eyes went to the gun again.
“All this isn’t necessary,” he said. “Why don’t you turn around and go back down the mountain before something happens that can’t be undone?”
Instead of answering, she put the truck in drive and left him standing there. In the rearview she saw him take the thing he had placed beneath the tail of his shirt and raise it to his lips. It was a radio and she knew whatever he was using it for probably concerned her, and was probably also not good.
After a mile, she took down the .38 and placed it beneath her thigh, keeping pressure on it so that it would not slide away as she continued up the mountain, taking each curve in the road and looking up at the rearview each time, half expecting to see John still following her.
When she came around the next curve of the road she saw two church trucks waiting crossways. Four men stood there, each of them carrying what she could only guess from this distance was a rifle or even a machine gun. She stopped the truck and took the gun from beneath her thigh and flipped open the cylinder to look in on the casings. She had half a mind just to turn around. But she knew that she wouldn’t, to give up now was to give up on her brother and all that he’d ever meant to her, all that had been her family and that her father had fought so fiercely to preserve.
She pushed the transmission into reverse and threw a hand up across the bench seat and then slammed down on the gas pedal. The truck tires spun and she was moving now, going backwards on the road, thinking of a small gravel logging road she’d seen that went up the mountain. When she came around the curve just before the gravel road she saw John coming up along the mountain in his own truck.
For only a moment she thought of her father. She thought of how they had found him, bent over the wheel, the front windshield cracked and the big truck buckled and bent. There had been no witnesses, no evident cause for what had happened to him, but he was dead now and he had gone out just like she was, trying to bring back her brother. She thought of John’s words, what had been said, what he had meant and she knew almost beyond a doubt that her father had not died in an accident.
Mary May did not slow as she came up on John, instead she mashed down on the gas and with the engine whining she cut the wheel hard to the left as soon as she saw the gravel offshoot and then bounced off the road. She was going backwards now up the mountain, the gravel catching in the tires and pinging in the wheel wells and when she turned to glance back through the front windshield she could see John following through the dust of her tires.
Down on the roadway the two other church trucks had turned in, one after the other, and followed John up the logging road.
Mary May took this all in as she drove, the engine blaring and the speedometer reading forty miles an hour as she kept going in reverse. There was nowhere on the narrow road to turn around so she kept her foot to the pedal, her arm up over the bench, her eyes on the road. The gravel had disappeared, she was driving on sodden dirt lined on all sides by the thick growth of alpine forest. The truck splashing through puddles with the mud tossed into the air by the tires and landing against the rear window. The rear bed of her truck seen as it bounced up out of a deep puddle looking like the hull of some boat breaking through muddy brown waves. The window gradually clouding with the spray off the tires.
When she hit whatever it was that she hit—a rock or a branch laid out in the road—she was still going forty miles per hour. It was enough to send the truck sliding sideways on the road. She tried to brake and spin the wheel, something caught… the truck went airborne, crashing over the side of the road into the forest beyond.
I
Those who put their hands upon our ark, those who mean to drown us in the flood, those who want to cast us aside after all our toil—they will find any hand they put upon us will be severed and taken from their arm. Cut from them just as easily as the farmer, after all his labor, now bends to reap his wheat.
ONE WEEK BEFORE…
THE BEAR WAS A BIG BOAR GRIZZLY DOWN OUT OF CANADA. Thunder had woken Will Boyd and he had come out into the night and looked to the north where the silhouette of the Northern Rockies stood like dark sentries amid the lighter gray of cloud and moon. The storm was somewhere to the north. He had felt it building all through the day as he worked, the air growing thick and that damp heavy feel that built with it. Erased in a second as the rain came down and the sky lit and cracked open like shattered lake ice soon subsumed by the pool of water it had grown from.
Six or seven miles away on the slope of the mountain he could see how the rain had started to fall in sheets, pushed forward on the wind. He stood and watched it from his place on the hill. The forest all around him, lodgepole pine and white spruce, and farther down in the hummock between foothills and forests he could see how the lightning lit and expanded across the field of Junegrass below.
He had crossed that same field many times in the past twelve years or so. He knew what it looked like in full spring bloom, filled with purple harebell and blue flax. In the summer, much of it gone to golden green and then brown all through the fall, until it sat scraped to a flat land of white for six months of the year. He crossed this field in bitter cold and deep fetid summer, moving down from the cabin he’d been given, across land the church had charged him with watching over, carrying with him the two plastic buckets he used to collect his water. Often, he would see elk or deer, sometimes a hawk or eagle circling high above.
Now he stood above this field, wrapped in the same wool blanket he had taken from his bed and he watched the far rain being pushed from ridge to ridge as if the wind were a thing to be seen and touched. The first rumble of thunder had woken him from his sleep and he had walked out into the blue night and waited, watching the far mountain. The lightning crashed a second time and the thunder followed a few moments later. The surrounding hills and mountains lit anew in that electric light of blue and white. Will pulled the blanket closer around his shoulders, moving forward a little, watching the pulse of light fade away and letting his eyes adjust again. The lightning had forked and branched and when he closed his eyes he could still see it there captured in the blackness beneath his lids.
What he saw first was the deer, a full-grown buck, just beginning to grow its antlers for the year. When the lightning struck again it had come halfway across the field in the darkness. Caught moving, frozen in time by the bolt of lightning from above, one of its front legs outstretched and the two powerful back legs caught mid-bound as the animal appeared to float across the field. Will saw this animal and then saw it disappear again, the lightning fading from the sky and the boom of the thunder soon following, the storm now grown closer and the foothills far out beginning to disappear within the rain.
He took several steps farther into the grass and sedge in search of the buck, but in the spare seconds it had shown itself it was gone again, rushed across the field as if in flight.