There was still nobody when dusk came. The lights went on in Frank Wells’ barns, not in the house; they were still away. More customers came, and they kept him busy at the grill. The next thing he knew it was dark, and still no sign. At midnight he cleaned the grill and the chili pans and dishes and locked up and turned out the lights.
He went into the living room — Prince coming sorrowfully at his heels — and sat down facing the window in the dark. The snow lay blue-white under the moon, and the walls of the room around him were blue-white silver glints, the man and woman, the bridge, the tree, the children. The woods were quiet. Up on Crow Mountain, in the fourteen-room brick house where George Loomis rattled around alone like a ghost, there were no lights on; nothing moved. There would be no light on down at Freund’s place either, beyond the woods; the family would be asleep; there were chores to do in the morning. Willard Freund would be awake though, sitting smiling to himself, or would be flitting around somewhere outside.
Voices mumbled around him, unintelligible, and he leaned forward in his chair. He saw without surprise that there were birds flying above the woods, thousands of them, gliding silently like owls, but talking, mumbling words like human beings. They flew through steam from the trees, or fog, or smoke maybe. Sometimes he could see only the smoke and the birds, as though the woods had disappeared or slipped from his mind, and then he could see the woods again, gray, moving closer. A sound of wind or fire blurred the voices and stirred the smoke into slow torsion, obliterating the birds, the bridge and the willow tree, the pines. When he saw the man coming across the yard, Henry jumped up.
The snow lay blue-white, crisp, and the trees were far away again, distinct in the sharp night air. The dog was watching him, ears raised.
And at last it all came clear to him. There never would be anybody there. Willard Freund wouldn’t show himself again as long as he lived. Callie wouldn’t see him either, or if she did it wouldn’t matter, because it was too late now. It was as if it was him, Willard Freund, that was killed by it. You had to be there, and Willard Freund hadn’t been, and now there was no place left for him, no love, no hate — not in his father’s house, even. Willard would see. No place but the woods — bare trees and snow and the low-moving shadows of dogs gone wild and birds and, maybe, if stories were true, bobcats.
He moved toward the window a little, not knowing he was doing it, and stood bent forward, looking out, not aware anymore of the room behind him. There was a game, a child’s game, where you stood the dominoes in a row and touched the end one and made them fall one after another, clattering. If one of the dominoes wasn’t in line it would still be standing there after the others had fallen down, would still be standing there erect, like a narrow, old-fashioned tombstone, all by itself on a windy hill, till doomsday.
Henry stood at the window looking out for a long time; then, breathing shallowly to cut down the pain, he turned and moved into the bedroom.
IV. THE THINGS
1
Henry and Callie came out on the porch to watch him down the driveway. Callie was holding the baby, wrapped up in its yellow blanket, she herself in one of her own tricolor afghans, three shades of green, waving with her free hand, and Henry was close beside her, a little behind her, like a balding upright bear with one paw on her shoulder, waving too. The dog was at her other side. The porch light was on — cheap imitation of a carriage lamp — and beyond that there was the light in the living room windows, giving the figures on the porch a kind of aura, their faces not as light as their outlines. On the yard, in the dewy, new-mown grass to their left and in front of them, there were rectangular splays of light from the windows and the open door, and there was faint light on the sharp little crocuses below the window and still fainter light on the carious trunks and lower boughs of the tamaracks at the edge of the driveway, beyond the painted rocks. The tops of the trees were dark silhouettes, as black as the mountain or the gable of the house; on the other side of the silhouettes was the abyss of sky dotted with stars. It was all like a picture for a life insurance ad in the Saturday Evening Post. He could envy them.
When he came to the highway he stopped and waited, the only hand he had leaving the steering wheel to shift down to low, his foot on the brake, the truck nosing sharply downward. There were headlights coming from the south. He looked back and saw Henry and Callie going into the house, the dog standing up now, neither friendly nor unfriendly, merely official, the way shepherds were supposed to be, watching. The porch lights flicked on and off — Callie saying one more goodbye — then stayed off. Almost the same instant, the headlights on the highway veered toward him crazily, then teetered away again, the last possible second. The car’s inside lights were on, and he had a fleeting glimpse of drunken kids leering out at him as their car burned past. “Crazy sons of bitches!” he thought, his heart pounding, and he was still hearing, as though time had snagged, the sudden howl of the motor and the rushing wind and the scream of bad tappets. They shot away down the level space in front of Henry’s, then up the farther hill. In a matter of seconds they were over the hill and gone, and the night was empty. He pulled out onto the highway, his right leg shaky on the accelerator. And now — the whole beautiful night gone sour — he was thinking again of the murder.
Henry had told him about it. He’d heard it on the radio. “It was up on Nickel Mountain, not ten miles from here,” he said. “Some old man. They said his name was — I forget. I guess when he come home they were already inside the house. They hit him on the head with some kind of a pipe. The way they had it on the radio, he was a mess.”
Callie was sitting with the baby on her lap. The light from the lamp over her head gave her hair a sheen. The baby was asleep, its fingers curled around one of hers, but she was still singing to it.
George had said, “They know yet who did it?” The picture in his mind was of his own house, as isolated as any to be found and one that would no doubt be attractive to vandals or thieves — a high, old brick house with balustered porches, round-arched windows, lightning rods, cupolas, and facing the road a Victorian tower like a square, old-fashioned silo. “They don’t know yet,” he said. “Could’ve been anybody. Those lonely old houses, it’s a wonder things like that don’t happen more often.”
(“Sit,” Callie said. The dog lowered himself again slowly, like a gray-black lion at her feet, and laid his wide head on his front paws, ears raised, mournful eyes looking up at her. He sighed.)
George Loomis turned the spoon over idly in his hand while they talked. It was silver plate, one of their wedding presents. He was sorry they hadn’t chosen something real — because they were his friends, and it disturbed him that friends of his should have junk in their house. She’d chosen it because it was “practical,” no doubt, forgetting that plate would scratch and wear away and that anyhow when you married a man who’d been a bachelor all those years you didn’t need to squeeze your pennies till Lincoln squeaked. But above all what was wrong was that it was light: In your hand it felt like nothing. With good things, you knew you had them when you had them. That was how it was with all their things — except the solid old sterling candlesticks (up on top of the player piano where they didn’t belong, no candles in them) and maybe the antimacassars from Callie’s Aunt Mae, and Callie’s afghans. But if it didn’t matter to you then it didn’t, that was it. Except that he knew it did matter to Henry. Why did he let her do it? He said abruptly, “Maybe it was thieves.”