She was trembling. The man scared her. She stayed there, squatting and holding Top, sound seeming to disappear into the noise in her mind. She stayed until she finally calmed and then she and Top started home, first walking, then running down the trail.
“What in heaven’s name is the matter with you?” her mother said when they burst into the yard. She was taking clothes from the line and had a bunch of them draped over one arm, a basket for pins crooked onto the other.
“Nothing,” Jane said when she could. “Top and me thought maybe there was a bear.”
“A bear!” her mother said. “This close to the house? Did you see it?”
She shook her head. Then her mother shook her head, too.
“Imagining things again, are you?”
And Jane knew she was talking about that quiet evening when she was little and heard some terrifying beast walk growling by the house beneath the open window and burst into tears, but no one else had heard a thing. And now she was old enough to wonder, what if she had only imagined the beast, and if so, where had that come from? Why and even how would a small child carry something like that in her imagination if it were not already there when she was born, and for some reason? And if it were not to make sure the child learned to keep in her heart a certain measure of fearfulness, in order to keep herself safe, what other reason could there be? There was something frightening about Lon Temple that seemed to bring up a similar feeling in her.
But these were not the kinds of things she cared to try to discuss with her mother. It was perhaps something she could bring up with Dr. Thompson. But she couldn’t imagine how she could bring it up without feeling silly, like a little girl with an overly rich and foolish imagination.
IT WAS JUST under a fortnight after her encounter with Temple in the woods when she came home from a long walk down by the fishing pond and saw Dr. Thompson’s car parked in the yard. He was sitting in her father’s rocker on the front porch, smoking his pipe, a glass of water on the little stand beside him. She stopped still in the yard, that same kind of fear she had thought she might discuss with him suddenly there, inside her. After a moment, she walked on up.
“What’s happened?” she said.
He puffed his pipe, but it had gone out.
“Something got to be wrong before I can come by, now?”
“Well, no.”
“But it’s kind of odd, me sitting out here on the porch by myself.”
“Yes.”
He nodded as if to himself, tapped his pipe out against his boot.
“Temple’s wife is in there with your mother and father,” he said. “There was an accident. You might better wait out here with me awhile.”
Her heart did a double bump in her chest.
“Tell me.”
He looked at her, as if trying to figure her state of mind.
“I haven’t even told you and you’re pale as a ghost.”
“I can tell it’s something bad.”
“Well, it is. Young Temple was killed today.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was an accident. He fell off the tractor and was cut up badly by the disc harrow. Died out in the field. Didn’t come in for lunch and his wife went out looking, found him there, tractor run up against a tree at the edge of the field and faltered. He’s down at their cabin, laid out on the floor there. His folks will come to take the body for burial.”
“How did it happen?” she said then. Her mind keening with the memory of their encounter, how she had hated him then as much as she’d feared him.
“Seems he was drinking. He smelled strong of it. I believe he got into your papa’s makings.”
She sat down onto the porch beside Dr. Thompson and they sat there awhile. Soon they heard the breezeway door to the kitchen open and Lacey hurried past them in tears.
“Miss Lacey?” Jane called, but all she could get out was a whisper.
Lacey Temple didn’t hear, her head down, walking slowly now toward the cabin where her husband lay dead.
“Boy wasn’t but twenty-three years old,” Dr. Thompson said. “And she’s not but, what, eighteen or nineteen, maybe.”
“I don’t know, really,” Jane said. She was watching Lacey Temple make her drifty way down the lane almost as if she were a bit drunk herself, wobbly.
“Still, not even twenty years of age and a widow. I need to talk to your mama and papa for a minute before the sheriff and coroner arrive, soon enough. I expected they’d have been here by now.” He got up and went into the house.
When she heard a car coming down the road and then turn into their drive, her father and Dr. Thompson came out onto the porch and went to meet it. They spoke to the two men in there, one the sheriff, and the other man in a dark suit must have been the coroner. Then the doctor went in the car with the coroner down toward the Temple cabin while her father and the sheriff walked that way and veered off toward the pasture where Temple must have been discing when he fell off and was killed. The four men came back around the same time and stood talking around the sheriff’s car for a few minutes, and then the sheriff and coroner left. Dr. Thompson said some words to her father, then got into his car and left, too.
Her father came over and told her to tell her mother that he had to go see Virgil in town and would be back as soon as possible.
“You take a plate of dinner down to the Temple girl, see if she’ll eat,” he said to Jane. “Your mama’s got one fixed in the kitchen.” Then he got into his cattle truck and left.
She stayed on the porch. She didn’t know what to feel anymore. She smelled supper cooking in the kitchen. She went inside just as her mother was covering a pie tin with a clean kitchen towel.
“You take this down to her,” she said.
“Mama,” Jane said, “I don’t want to.”
Her mother stopped and gave her a long stern look that didn’t need words to convey its meaning.
“But what if she won’t eat? How could she be hungry right now?”
“All you can do is try,” her mother said. “Go on, now. What’s the matter with you?”
Jane shook her head and didn’t answer. Couldn’t.
She freshened herself up and then walked down toward the Temple cabin, careful with the warm edges of the tin, using the towel so as not to burn her fingers, careful not to trip and spill it. She felt wooden and clumsy. When she got up onto the porch she set the tin down and knocked on the door. There was no lamp on inside although light was fading and shadows already deep inside.
When there was no answer, she called out, but in a fainter voice than she’d meant to. When Lacey Temple didn’t reply she grew worried, turned the knob on the cabin door, picked up the tin, gently opened the door with her shoulder, and went in.
It was just a two-room shotgun cabin with a little kitchen area in one corner of the front room, a small dining table with a couple of chairs in the other, and a sitting area against the other wall by a small fireplace. She stopped still when she saw, in the shadows, what had to be the body of young Temple lying on the floor over by the fireplace, covered with a bloodied counterpane. She felt a coldness run through her, and sick, as if she might vomit.
“I can’t bring myself to wash him,” she heard Lacey’s voice say then, coming from their little bedroom in the back. Then she saw the ghostly figure step into the shadowed doorway. She no longer wore the bonnet and her pale face glowed softly in the faint light left in the windows.
“He’d been out there in the sun long enough the blood had dried hard and I don’t want to hurt him cleaning it off. I know he won’t feel nothing but I can’t do it.”
Jane could hear the crying in her voice. She worked hard to find her own.