“Drew went against us when he killed your father. And we could not forget or forgive him for his sin, for he had told us his envy was gone and we, foolishly had believed he followed in the true path The Father had set for him.”
She blinked. She tried to understand what was happening. Somehow her brother was dead. Somehow he was laying in her arms, and John stood over them now, telling her it was her brother who had done this to himself, telling her he deserved all that he had received. “You did this to him,” she said again. “It was you and not some other. It was you and The Father that killed him.”
John stood there. He looked her over as if she were his own creation come to life. “Your father made you proud. He made you think you could not be touched, that you were right in all you did. But you were not. We came as witnesses,” John said, now moving his arms to show her he meant all the members of Eden’s Gate who had come with him and now were moving past him down the hill. “We came to witness what you did to your brother—what your family did to him. We did not do this. You did. And we will hold this over you for all time. We will control you in this way. It is important you understand this, Mary May. You were never right and now you have become the sin I did not see in you. You have become wrath, and I will always remember you and be ready to help you, for I too was wrong. I was wrong about you, Mary May. You are wrath and I will be the one to take that sin from you one day.”
WILL COULD NOT BELIEVE IT. THE WORLD THROUGH THE SCOPE always acted in silent pantomime. The characters at such a distance as to be rendered mute, only seen in movements that mirrored those of the real world, but that were somehow not of the real world. The sound of the bullet had made it real.
It had cut through the distance as if through glass dividing one place from another. He watched Drew fall. He watched Mary May move to him, and now, as he watched through the scope, Will saw John standing there, speaking to her in silence once again.
He pulled his eye back from the rifle scope. He had to blink and to wipe the sweat away. Through it all his eyes were on Mary May below and John standing over her. Every member of Eden’s Gate now moved back down the hill, as if Drew’s death had been the point all along. As if this somehow was what they had come for, all of them filing past John after bearing witness to this act.
“Was it her?” Jerome asked now. He stood above Will, and with the shotgun and the vest he looked every part God’s sentinel here on earth.
“I think so,” Will said. “I think she shot him. I think she shot Drew and I feel I know why.”
“What does this mean now?” Jerome asked. “What does this mean for Mary May or for Eden’s Gate?”
Will wiped a finger beneath his eye again. He felt the damp moisture of his sweat. His mind was going a hundred different places, but as he put his eye to the scope again, he watched John there and then after some final word, John was gone, following as the last of his people filed past. The back of John’s head now indistinguishable from all the rest, as if they were him and he was them. “It means they have a secret they can hold over her and though she will try to fight it, there is nothing you or I, or even Mary May can do about it. The sooner we all realize that the better.”
“I don’t accept that,” Jerome said. “No one is beyond help. Not you or me or Mary May.”
Will said nothing. It was a mess. It was all a fucking mess and there was no way he could see his way out of it. But he knew they would try.
V
No one believes death is coming until the moment it does. And most still refuse to believe it even then.
WILL HAD ABOUT THE SAME FEELING HE’D HAD WHEN HE came back from the war, like nothing had been accomplished, but he thought now maybe the accomplishment wasn’t about winning a war, it was about surviving. It was about coming back alive from a place so few were able to come back from. That was the accomplishment and it’s what drove him now as he skirted the tree line with the broad Junegrass field before him and the place he had thought of as home for the past twelve years, the cabin Eden’s Gate had given him up there on the hill.
Holly and three men from Eden’s Gate were waiting up there at his place. And as far as Will could tell they’d been waiting for several days now. From out of the shadows he watched them. He watched them up there as they brought furniture out and burned it in the night, bits of wood, the mattress he had slept on, clothes, the single chair and table he had within. Holly often came to the edge of the hill where he had once stood to watch the bear. The woman watching not for bear as Will had done, but watching for Will as if he now were the threat that bear had been—something dangerous out there in the greater wilderness, something lost, something looking for its next kill.
But Will was none of that now. He was a survivor. He had made it back but he could see now that this was not his home, not at least in the way it once had been. Nothing in Hope County was the way it once had been.
But Will took his time, careful now. He watched them through the night then into the day. He waited in the woods as the men went to piss, close enough then to hear the urine hit the ground and to hear the breathing of each man as they relieved themselves. He watched them go for water then return, using the same buckets Will himself had used for so many years. He watched them eat his food and plunder the stores he had set aside and he watched them make themselves at home in the home that had once been his.
When he left, a day later, nothing had changed for him in all his studying of the place. It was not his home anymore and he knew it had stopped being that a while back. He followed the river for a quarter of the day and he often stopped to glass the land beyond. He did not know what he was searching for but he knew wherever he went he would be okay. He could live off the land if he needed to. He could go back to the old ways. He could use the knowledge that had been handed down to him through the generations. He had snares and traps. He had cartridges and the rifle, he had clothes, and anything he did not have he could make or forage.
His plan was to dig in deep. Get back into the woods and into the mountain valleys and rocky strongholds of the range and make a place among the trees and crags. He thought now about all that had been attempted. He’d paid a price for what he’d done. Perhaps Eden’s Gate and The Father had been right about him all along, about his sin. About the demon that lived inside of him, that would not let him forget the sins he’d inflicted on his enemies and on all he loved. Will had thought somehow that helping Mary May would give him solace. He wondered now if it had.
He thought about all there was yet to do. He did not have an answer for any of the thoughts roaming about his mind yet, and he crossed upriver, using the shallows to skirt back and forth along the waterway, moving ever farther north. The rocky outcroppings grew around him as he went and the feeling that things unseen were closing in on him, moving in the shadows and thickets he crossed through or following along beside him on the high spines of rock that often cut the light from the river valley down below.
He felt haunted by this feeling and often he paused midstride, or even halfway across a series of stones that spanned the river, and he would turn his eyes back on the path he’d taken and his ears would try to pick the slightest irregularity from the rush of water and overhead breeze. He thought about Eden’s Gate. He thought about those men who had been waiting for him at his cabin. He thought about the ghosts that followed him and what they wanted.