She knelt in the attic and mopped up the turpentine. She went down to the kitchen. The children would be home in 10 minutes. She sat at the kitchen table and realized with mild wonder that the tears were still running down her face.
When the school bus arrived, they were marching him through the pasture to the official cars parked at the edge of the road. The children wanted to watch. She sent them, frightened, into the house, using a tone of voice they had never heard.
She watched him stumbling wearily along with bowed head, hands chained behind him. A car drove away with him. The helicopter landed in the pasture. Only when she saw a large group of men start walking toward her house, and saw that some of them had cameras, did she realize the ugly rawness of her scraped thigh, the spots of paint on the ancient sun suit.
She told them just what had happened. They said the helicopter wouldn’t have come in for a closer look had it not been for the orange patch on the roof, a patch that had not been there the last time they had been over. They told her she was a brave woman. The man was dangerous — homicidal.
“What is his name?”
“Brindon. James Brindon. He’s 50 — but he doesn’t look it. He was an engineer and got a head injury in a construction accident more than 20 years ago. Lots of brain damage. Nobody thought he was dangerous. But some wise kid at the farm was picking on him all the time lately.”
“What will become of him?”
“Don’t worry, lady. They aren’t about to let him get out again. Not ever.”
She hadn’t meant it that way, but she saw little point in trying to tell them what she had meant.
Paul had been telephoned, and he arrived, very upset, just as the officers and reporters left. He made her tell him all about it.
“You bandaged his hand? You touched him!”
“He was hurt.”
The kids were out in the yard, giving a shrill imaginative account of the whole thing to the Carter children. “...chased her all over the roof!” she heard Buddy exclaim.
A poor witless thing, trapped, hidden away in some back corridor of the damaged brain. Remnants of a fineness in the brutalized face. There had been some communication. A little. “Thank you,” he said. For kindness.
Paul beamed at her. “Well, sweety, you’re quite the heroine! Escape from a monster!”
“Could you be quiet!”
He stared at her, his smile fading. And she resented all the neatness and orderliness and gentleness of him. She resented his lack of revolt, his freedom from any kind of desperation. Something in that damaged and dangerous man had called out to her own autumn madness. For a little while there had been another dimension to the world, and it would disappear so quickly.
“Susan, I didn’t mean to...”
She saw his concern, then, and his goodness and the quiet quality of his love, and she went quickly to him, and he held her in his arms.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and she told herself that this was really all she wanted and needed. His arms, and the dear house around them, and the child voices in the dusk.
She knew then that the autumn disease of the heart was gone for this season. Susan was home again, free of all the half-heard voices that seemed to come from just beyond the hill. Content once more. Maybe forever. Or maybe just till October would come again — that strangest month of all.
