He imagined Tomo staring up at him now with his one good dead eye. It was dried and rheumy when Gob peeped under the coffin lid at the funeral, shriveled like a very old grape. Gob stared back, conjuring Tomo’s supine dead image, coloring him with an additional two weeks of decay. If he kept digging, he would eventually be able to reach out his hand to touch the dead flesh. It was just the few feet of earth and a few inches of wood separating them. Or it was just a few feet of earth and whatever walls God might throw up between the living and the dead. But if the earth would yield to a human hand, why not those other walls? “I will bring you back,” Gob swore to his brother, speaking into the dirt so he soiled his tongue and his teeth. And not just as a spirit like their lying mama said she saw. He would somehow bring his brother back into living flesh. He would find a way to do that, because his brother would do the same for him, and because he was to blame for Tomo’s death — he felt sure Tomo would not have been killed if he’d gone with him. This was Gob’s conviction: that he had killed his brother with his fear as surely as the Rebel had with his bullet. The prospect of living a life without Tomo was no less impossible than the prospect of somehow turning him from a rotten horror to a warm living boy, and if fate had determined that he must do one or the other, he would much prefer to do the latter. “I will bring you back,” he said again, and the words were a great comfort to him, because he could only reconcile himself to his brother’s death by thinking it temporary. Feeling at peace, Gob snuggled deeper into the dirt, and listened as a gust of wind came into the orchard, shaking the trees and knocking fruit to the ground. There was another noise — he could hear it if he listened very, very hard, a noise like a giant softly breathing, or like the ocean, which he remembered from his distant childhood in San Francisco. The noise rose and fell, lulling him to sleep.
Gob’s ignorance necessitated a teacher, but who could teach him how to defeat death? He thought of Miss Maggs, simply because she was a teacher, but he was sure she could only teach him how to be bitter and ugly and how to be a bad shot with a book. His mama might have been a candidate if she hadn’t been such a shameless liar. He did not trust her any longer, and if she could not even bring Tomo’s spirit to talk to him how could she put life back in his flesh? For the same reason, Aunt Tennie was not suitable. Utica had no knowledge he needed. Grandpa Buck was not stupid, but Gob needed no instruction on how to cheat people. Uncle Malden was as dumb as he was smelly. Grandma Anna had only small power, and anything he might learn from her he could learn from her teacher. So Gob turned on his heel, away from Homer town, and he walked through the orchard and up the high hill, then into the woods beyond that, up into the highest hills where the Urfeist lived. It was a simple decision; there was only one person in his whole world from whom he had any hope of even beginning to learn what he must. But, though it seemed simple and right to take the trip into the highest hills, he felt dizzy and weak and cowardly as he shuffled along under the dark trees. He knew very well what the Urfeist took from the children he captured. Weighed against his brother’s life, it seemed a small thing. And it made great sense to him that he should have to do something fearful to undo the consequences of his fear.
Alanis Bell found him as he was passing over the high hill.
“Gob Woodhull,” she said. “Where are you going?”
“Get away from me,” Gob said. She danced around him, skipping and throwing her hands out. Her prancing seemed an offense against his sadness.
“It is a beautiful night,” she said. “Where are you going in such a hurry?”
“To see the Urfeist,” he said. That put an end to her prancing. She grabbed his arm.
“Hush! You know better than to say that name. You’ll call him down on us!” He pulled his arm away.
“Leave me alone,” he said, but she kept clutching at him.
“He’ll bite your finger! He’ll eat you up! He’ll break your bones!”
“I’ll break yours!” he said, pushing her away from him. “I’ll lift you up and break you in half, you girl!” He had pushed her down and now he was standing over her, ready to step on her or kick her. “Go away,” he said quietly. He turned away and walked on.
“Go on!” Alanis Bell called out behind him. “I don’t care!” But the warbling noise came drifting after him as he walked. He stopped up his ears with his fingers.
Gob did not know where he was going. He simply wandered. It was common knowledge that the Urfeist could smell a child from miles away. Gob closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep, because it was also said that the Urfeist drew sleeping children to him with a call that only they could hear and follow. More than one child slept with a leash that ran from ankle to bedpost, to prevent just that sort of wandering. Gob got quite lost.
The wind had picked up, and a bit of slivered moon was in the sky. It peeped out occasionally from between racing blue clouds, and lit the spinning fall of oak leaves when the wind nudged them off the trees. Gob happened upon a hawthorn bush. Resting next to it, he saw that a shrike had left a tiny shrew impaled on a long thorn. If that is not an omen, he thought, then my name is Mary Lincoln and I own many fine gowns. It was just then, when cowardice very nearly overwhelmed him, that he caught sight of a cheery yellow light beckoning through the bush.
He picked his way through with care. He hid his hands in his coat and hunched his face down against his chest, but still he got a scratch high on his forehead. He wondered if the odor of blood would draw the Urfeist from his cave. Gob stood watching the entrance for a long time. There was a space cleared before it, where roses were planted in orderly rows, and when he moved a little closer he saw that taller rosebushes flanked the cave mouth, which opened into what must surely be the highest hill in the woods. The entrance turned as soon as it opened. All he saw was yellow light flickering on gray rock.
“I’m here,” Gob said, speaking so low he could hardly hear himself above the wind.
“I know it,” said a voice beside him. The Urfeist looked just how people made him out to look. There was the scraggly iron-colored hair, the jaunty red cap. He wore a chemise of some animal’s skin, and the kilt of fingers was pulled up high on his hairy belly. His feet were wound with bark. “You are welcome here, child,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.” He was always waiting for a child to come to him. The Urfeist smiled, showing strong white teeth that would have been the envy of a horse.