Nor any human soul, he said.
The fire had died to coals. The tinker swung down the lamp and their shadows wheeled wildly from each other and froze on opposite walls. Don’t foller me, the tinker said. You foller me and I’ll kill ye.
She didn’t move.
Bitch, he said. Goddamn lyin bitch.
She had begun to keen softly into her hands. The tinker could hear it a long way down the road.
He could hear it far over the cold and smoking fields of autumn, his pans knelling in the night like buoys on some dim and barren coast, and he could hear it fading and hear it die lost as the cry of seabirds in the vast and salt black solitudes they keep.
HOLME WALKED across the stony earth with his eyes on his broken boots, crossing a black and fallow bottom newly turned, the wind coming very steady and cold and with it like pieces of scaled slate martins with shrill chittering cast up motionless to break and wheel low along the ground past him once again. When he reached the fence he stopped for a moment to look back at the road and then he went on, crossing into a field of rank weeds that heeled with harsh dip and clash under the wind as if fled through by something unseen.
He stood before the cabin uncertainly, his palms resting in the small of his back. He looked toward the road again. Then he mounted the steps to the porch and crossed and entered through the open door.
It was a very old cabin and the ceiling of the room he stood in was little higher than his head, the unhewn beams smoked a foggy and depthless black and trellised with cobwebbing of the same color. The floor was buckled and the walls seemed tottering and he could see nothing plane or plumb anywhere. There was a small window mortised crookedly into the logs of one wall, the sash hung with leather hinges. That and the long clayless chinks among the logs let in the waning light of this day and wind crossed the room with the steady cool pull of running water. There was a claymortared fireplace of flatless and illfitted fieldstone which bulged outward in the room with incipient collapse, a wagon spring for lintel, the hearth of poured mud hard and polished as stone. A serpentine poker. Two wooden bedsteads with tickings of husks and a halfbed with a mattress on which lay curled a dead cat leering with eyeless grimace, a caved and maggoty shape that gave off a faint dry putrescence above the reek of aged smoke. He took hold of the mattress and pulled it from the bed and dragged it to the door, fighting it through the narrow opening and outside and long bright red beetles coming constantly from beneath the cat to scatter in radial symmetry outward and drop audibly to the floor. He threw the mattress in the yard and went back in. In the kitchen a doorless woodstove propped in the front with two bricks against the floor’s fierce incline. A partitioned mealbin with sifter and a hard dry crust of meal adhering to the wood, the meal impregnated with worms whose shed husks littered the floor of the bin among micedroppings and dead beetles. A solid butternut safe in which languished some pieces of cheap white crockery, chipped and handleshorn coffeecups, plates serrated about their perimeters as though bitten in maniacal hunger, a tin percolator in which an inverted salmoncan sat for a lid. A nameless gray dust lay over everything. He returned to the front room and at the bed pressed one spread palm down in the center of the ticking and looked about him wearily.
Later he went out and gathered wood. He found beanpoles in a log crib behind the house and brought them in and he found some roughsawn chestnut boards. When he had got the fire going he pulled one of the beds up toward the hearth and sat down and watched the flames. Smoke seeped from under the wagon spring and stood in blue tiers and he could hear swifts in the flue fluttering like wind in a bottle. He sat on the bed with his hands dangling between his knees. The window light had crept from the floor onto the far wall and the room lay traversed with a bar of bronze and hovering dust. After a while he rose again and went out for more wood.
When he came back he built up the fire and pulled off the stinking boots and stretched out on the bed. There was a string of dried peppers hanging from a nail in the beam over the fireplace. They looked like leather. In the chimney’s throat frail curds of old soot quivered with the heat. A deermouse came down from somewhere in the logs, soundless as a feather falling, paused with one foot tucked to his white bib and regarded him with huge black eyes. He watched it. He blinked and it was gone. He slept.
He was cold all night and in the morning when he woke there was a frost. There was also a man watching him with one bright china eye from behind the paired bores of a shotgun.
Get up, he said.
Holme sat slowly.
Now get your boots. He motioned sideways with his head to where they lay in the floor.
He bent to reach for the boots and got one up, fumbling at it with his naked foot.
Hold it, the man said, waving the barrels in an arc before his face.
He stopped, holding the boot up, watching the man.
Just tote em with ye.
He got the other boot and sat there in the bed holding them in his lap.
Now let’s go, the man said, stepping back and motioning toward the door with the shotgun.
He rose and crossed the floor and stepped out. The long flat grass about the house was blanched with frost, the barren landscape beyond sprayed with those small and anonymous birds of winter. He had not thought of such cold weather and was surprised to see it come.
Let’s go, the man said.
He descended the rimed planks and stood barefooted in the yard. The man came down the steps waving the barrels at him. They crossed through the frozen grass to the fence and then across the iron clods and furrows of the plowed land and into the road.
Gee, the man said.
Holme looked at him.
The man waved the barrels to the right and he tucked the boots up under his arm and turned down the road, advancing upon his lean and dancing shadow with feet that winced in the cold sand. He could hear behind him the measured tread of the armed man, and after a while his breathing, but the man spoke no word. The sun was gaining and he could feel it a little on his back and it felt good.
When they had gone a mile or better along the road they came to a wagon road that went off to the right.
Here ye go, the man said behind him.
He turned up the road. It was washed out and weed-grown and with the mounting sun water had begun again over the bare stones in the gullies. They climbed on, past high oblique faults of red sandstone, coming at last into a field where the road leveled.
Just hop on down, friend, the man said. Tain’t far now.
They came past a barn and beyond that a frame house mounted at the corners on high cairns of rock. A row of chickens regarded them from the porch.
Ho Squire, the man called out, hallooing along his raised palm. Hold up right here, he said to Holme. He advanced to the porch and rapped on the floor. Ho there, he called.
Come up, said a woman’s voice from the house.
Go on, the man said.
Holme shifted the boots to the other arm and mounted onto the porch past the chickens and went in. He could smell breakfast cooking.
On back, the man said.
He crossed the room and went through the door at the far side. The woman was coming in carrying an empty pail. She said Howdy without looking at them and went into the kitchen. They followed her. There was a man sitting at the table eating eggs and biscuits from a large platter before him and as they entered he looked up at them. He was dressed in his undershirt, a verminous-looking bag of ashgray flannel from which the sleeves were gone at the elbow as if chewed off. He turned back to his plate before speaking.
Mornin John. Been huntin?
Huntin housebreakers, the man said.
Have eh?