What happent to his eye? Holme said.
What eye.
His eye. He gestured. The one he ain’t got.
I reckon he must of lost it somewheres. He still got one.
He ort to have two.
Maybe he ort to have more’n that. Some folks has two and cain’t see.
Holme didn’t say anything.
I reckon that tinker might know what happent to it.
What tinker?
That’n in yan tree, said Harmon, pointing with the rifle.
Hush. Don’t pay him no mind mister. What did ye do to your leg there?
Nothin.
The bearded one was tunneling gouts of mud from the welt of his boot with a stick. Well, I see ye didn’t have no trouble findin us.
I wasn’t huntin ye.
You got here all right for somebody bound elsewhere.
I wasn’t bound nowheres. I just seen the fire.
I like to keep a good fire. A man never knows what all might chance along. Does he?
No.
No. Anything’s liable to warsh up. From nowheres nowhere bound.
Where are you bound? Holme said.
I ain’t, the man said. By nothin. He looked up at Holme. We ain’t hard to find. Oncet you’ve found us.
Holme looked away. His sweatblistered forehead shone in the firelight. He looked toward the tinker’s cart and he looked at the child. Where’s she at? he said.
Who’s that?
My sister.
Ah, said the man. The one run off with that tinker.
Them’s his traps yander.
The bearded one turned his head slightly and looked and turned back. Aye, he said. That’n you used to trade with.
I never give him no chap, Holme said. I just told her that.
Maybe thisn’s some other chap.
It ain’t nothin to me.
The bearded one raked a gobbet of clay from his stick and cast it into the fire. You know what I figure? he said.
What.
I figure you got this thing here in her belly your own self and then laid it off on that tinker.
I never laid nothin off on no tinker.
I reckon you figured he’d keep him hid for ye.
I never figured nothin.
What did ye have to give him?
I never give nobody nothin. I never had nothin.
Never figured nothin, never had nothin, never was nothin, the man said. He was looking at nothing at all. The mute one seemed to sleep, crouched at the man’s right with his arms dangling between his knees like something waiting to be wakened and fed.
What are you? Holme muttered.
What?
He said it again, sullenly.
The bearded one smiled. Ah, he said. Now. We’ve heard that before, ain’t we?
You ain’t nothin to me.
But the man didn’t seem to hear. He nodded as if spoken by other voices. He didn’t look at Holme.
You never did say what you done with your sister.
I never done nothin with her.
Where’s she at?
I don’t know. She run off.
You done told that.
It ain’t nothin to you.
I’ll be the judge of that.
Harmon turned, his cheek against the upright rifle-barrel. He smiled dreamily.
I reckon little sister’s just a little further on up the road, ain’t she? the man said.
I don’t know. I ain’t seen her.
No.
I allowed maybe you had, Holme said. You seem to know everbody’s business.
I guess it ain’t nothin to me. Is that right?
Holme didn’t answer.
The man wiped the stick and poked it into the fire and stretched forth his boot. Hand him here, he said.
What?
Hand him here. Yan chap.
Holme didn’t move. The child had not stopped watching him.
Unless you’d rather for Harmon to.
He looked at Harmon and then he bent forward and picked up the child. It made no gesture at all. It dangled from his hands like a dressed rabbit, a gross eldritch doll with ricketsprung legs and one eye opening and closing softly like a naked owl’s. He rose with it and circled the fire and held it out toward the man. The man looked at it a moment and then took it with one hand by its upper arm and placed it between his feet.
What do you want with him? Holme said.
Nothin. No more than you do.
He ain’t nothin to me.
No.
Where’s that tinker at if he was raisin him?
He’s all raised out. He cain’t raise no more.
You don’t need him.
Water in the summer and fire in the winter is all the need I need. We ain’t talkin about what I need. He spat across the child’s head into the fire and a thin chain of sparks ascended in the graygreen smoke. That ain’t what’s concerned.
No.
You ain’t no different from the rest. From any man borned and raised and have his own and die. They ain’t one man in three got even a black suit to die in.
Holme stood with his feet together and his hands at his sides like one arraigned.
What’s his name? the man said.
I don’t know.
He ain’t got nary’n.
No. I don’t reckon. I don’t know.
They say people in hell ain’t got names. But they had to be called somethin to get sent there. Didn’t they.
That tinker might of named him.
It wasn’t his to name. Besides names dies with the namers. A dead man’s dog ain’t got a name. He reached and drew from his boot a slender knife.
Holme seemed to be speaking to something in the night beyond them all. My sister would take him, he said. That chap. We could find her and she’d take him.
Yes, the man said.
I been huntin her.
Harmon was watching the man. Even the mute one stirred. The man took hold of the child and lifted it up. It was watching the fire. Holme saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat’s eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child’s throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly. The mute one knelt forward. He was drooling and making little whimpering noises in his throat. He knelt with his hands outstretched and his nostrils rimpled delicately. The man handed him the child and he seized it up, looked once at Holme with witless eyes, and buried his moaning face in its throat.
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON she entered the glade, coming down a footpath where narrow cart tracks had crushed the weeds and through the wood, half wild and haggard in her shapeless sundrained cerements, yet delicate as any fallow doe, and so into the clearing to stand cradled in a grail of jade and windy light, slender and trembling and pale with wandlike hands to speak the boneless shapes attending her.
And stepping softly with her air of blooded ruin about the glade in a frail agony of grace she trailed her rags through dust and ashes, circling the dead fire, the charred billets and chalk bones, the little calcined ribcage. She poked among the burnt remains of the tinker’s traps, the blackened pans confused among the rubble, the lantern with its skewed glass, the axle and iron wheelhoops already rusting. She went among this charnel curiously. She did not know what to make of it. She waited, but no one returned.
She waited all through the blue twilight and into the dark. Bats came and went. Wind stirred the ashes and the tinker in his tree turned slowly but no one returned. Shadows grew cold across the wood and night rang down upon these lonely figures and after a while little sister was sleeping.
The tinker in his burial tree was a wonder to the birds. The vultures that came by day to nose with their hooked beaks among his buttons and pockets like outrageous pets soon left him naked of his rags and flesh alike. Black mandrake sprang beneath the tree as it will where the seed of the hanged falls and in spring a new branch pierced his breast and flowered in a green boutonniere perennial beneath his yellow grin. He took the sparse winter snows upon what thatch of hair still clung to his dried skull and hunters that passed that way never chanced to see him brooding among his barren limbs. Until wind had tolled the tinker’s bones and seasons loosed them one by one to the ground below and alone his bleached and weathered brisket hung in that lonesome wood like a bone birdcage.