Walking home I was in a sort of daze-I could scarcely believe or accept what had seemed irrefutable while I talked with the preacher. Yet he had shown me the grave; and I had seen with my own eyes the transformation in Fenny-I had seen Gregory: it is not too much to say that I had felt him, the impression he made on me was that strong.
And then I stopped walking, about a mile from Four Forks, faced with proof that Gregory Bate knew exactly what I had discovered, and knew exactly what I had intended. One of the farmers' fields there formed a large wide bare hill visible from the road, and he was up on the hill staring down at me. He didn't move a muscle when I saw him, but his intensity quivered out of him, and I must have jumped a foot He was looking at me as though he could read every thought in my head. Far up in the clouds above him, a hawk was circling aimlessly. Any trace of doubt left me. I knew that everything Gruber had told me was true.
It was all I could do not to run. But I would not show cowardice before him, no matter how cowardly I felt. He was waiting for me to run, I imagine, standing up there with his arms hanging straight and his pale face visible as only a white smudge and all that feeling arrowing toward me. I forced myself to continue home at a walk.
Dinner I could scarcely force myself to swallow-I had no more than a bite or two. Mather said, "If you'll starve yourself there's more for the rest of us. It's no matter to me."
I faced him directly. "Did Fenny Bate have a brother as well as a sister?"
He looked at me with as much curiosity as he possessed.
"Well did he?"
"He did."
"What was the brother's name?"
"It was Gregory, but I'll thank you to refrain from speaking about him."
"Were you afraid of him?" I asked, because I saw fear on both his face and his wife's.
"Please, Mr. James," said Sophronia Mather. "This will do no good."
"Nobody speaks of that Gregory Bate," her husband said.
"What happened to him?" I asked.
He stopped chewing and put down his fork. "I don't know what you heard or who you heard it from, but I'll tell you this. If any man was damned, it was that Gregory Bate, and whatever happened to him was deserved. That's an end to talk of Gregory Bate." Then he pushed more food into his mouth, and the discussion was over. Mrs. Mather kept her eyes religiously on her plate for the rest of the meal.
I was in a stew. Neither of the two Bate children appeared in school for two or three days, and it was almost as though I had dreamed the whole affair. I went through the motions of teaching, but my mind was with them, especially poor Fenny, and the danger he was in.
What above all kept the horror before me was that I saw Gregory in town one day.
Because it was a Saturday, Four Forks was filled with farmers and their wives who came in for their shopping. Every Saturday, the little town had almost a fairground look, at least in contrast to the way it looked normally. The sidewalks were crowded and the stores were busy. Dozens of horses stamped in the street, and everywhere you saw the eager faces of kids, all piled into the backs of wagons, their eyes wide open with being in town. I recognized many of my pupils and waved to some of them.
Then a big farmer I'd never met before tapped my shoulder and said that he knew I was his son's teacher and that he wanted to shake my hand. I thanked him and listened to him talk for a bit. Then I saw Gregory over his shoulder. Gregory was leaning against the side of the post office, indifferent to everything about him and staring at me-just intently staring, as he must have been doing from the hilltop. My mouth dried up, and something obviously showed in my face, because my pupil's father stopped talking and asked me if I felt all right.
"Oh yes," I said, but it must have looked as if I were being deliberately rude, because I kept looking over his shoulder. No one else could see Gregory: they just walked by him, carrying on in the normal way, looking right through him.
Now where I had seen that abandoned freedom I could see only depravity.
I made some excuse to the farmer-a headache, an abscessed tooth-and turned back to Gregory. He was gone. He had vanished during the few seconds I was saying good-bye to the farmer.
So I knew that the showdown was coming, and that he would pick the time and place.
The next time Fenny and Constance came to school I was determined that I would protect them. They were both pale and quiet, and enough of an aura of strangeness enveloped them for the other children to leave them alone. It was perhaps four days since my seeing their brother leaning against the Four Forks post office. I could not imagine what had been happening to them since I had last seen them, but it was as though a wasting disease had hold of them. They seemed so lost and apart, those ragged backward children. I was determined to keep them under my protection.
When the lessons for the day were over, I kept them back as the others raced for home. They sat uncomplaining at their desks, stricken and dumb.
"Why did he let you come to school?" I asked.
Fenny looked at me blankly and said, "Who?"
I was dumbfounded. "Gregory, of course."
Fenny shook his head as if to blow away fog. "Gregory? We ain't seen Gregory for a long time. No, not for a long time now."
Now I was shocked-they were wan from his absence!
"Then what do you do with yourselves?"
"We go over."
"Go over?"
Constance nodded, agreeing with Fenny. "We go over."
"Go over where? Go over what?"
Now they were both looking at me with their mouths open, as if I were very dense.
"Go over to meet Gregory?" It was horrible, but I could think of nothing else.
Fenny shook his head. "We don't never see Gregory."
"No," said Constance, and I was horrified to hear regret in her voice. "We just go over."
Fenny seemed to come to life for a moment. He said, "But I heard him once. He said this is all there is, and there ain't no more. There ain't nothin' but this. There ain't nothin' like you said-like on maps. It ain't there."
"Then what's out there instead?" I asked.
"It's like what we see," Fenny said.
"See?"
"When we go," he answered.
"What do you see?" I asked.
"It's nice," Constance said, and put her head on the desk. "It's real nice."
I didn't have the faintest idea of what they were talking about, but I didn't like the sound of it much, and I thought I'd have time later to talk about it further. "Well, nobody's going anywhere tonight," I said. "I want both of you to stay here with me tonight. I want to keep you safe."
Fenny nodded, but stupidly and halfheartedly, as if he didn't care much where he spent his nights, and when I looked to Constance for agreement I saw that she had fallen asleep.
"All right then," I said. "We can fix up places to sleep later, and tomorrow I'll try to find beds for you in the village. You two children can't stay out in the woods on your own anymore."
Fenny nodded slackly again, and I saw that he too was on the verge of falling asleep. "You can put your head down," I said.
In seconds both of them were sleeping with their heads on their desks. I could almost have agreed with Gregory's dreadful statement at that moment-it was really as though this was all there was, all there was anywhere, just myself and the two exhausted children in a cold barn of a schoolhouse-my sense of reality had had too many knocks. As we three sat in the schoolhouse, the day began to end and the whole area of the room, dim at the best of times, became dark and shadowy. I did not have the heart to turn on the lights, so we sat there as at the bottom of a well. I had promised them that I would find beds in the village, but that miserable little hamlet not fifty paces down the road seemed miles off. And even if I'd had the energy and confidence to leave them alone, I couldn't imagine who'd take them in. If it were a well, it was really a well of hopelessness, and I seemed to myself as lost as the children.