The floor leveled out and he seemed in some lifeless manmade valley that went on forever. He moved moonlit though shadowless to the edge of the ice then a foot onto it and stopped where the white face of his son lay pressed against the underside of the ice, eyes open, dark hair fanned and listless in the still water.
He cried out in a strangled voice and fell to his knees. He could feel hot tears flood his eyes and course down his cheeks unchecked and bitter grief lay in him like a stone. He clawed at the whorled ice until his fingers were torn and bleeding and he ceased and looking skyward exhorted the fates who’d glanced aside for a moment and let this thing happen. All he saw was the seamless heavens and the slow drift of a dead and foreign moon.
The birds began to call again and their voices had the mournful cadence of doves. Willie, Willie, they called. When he looked again through the ice the face was gone and all there was beneath the translucent ice was motionless water and black frozen leaves.
He awoke breathless in the hot dark and his chest constricted and an ache in his throat and it was a few seconds before he knew where he was or that he had been dreaming. He lay with his mind sorting through the fragmented images separating real from imagined and he thought of her saying, “Where’s Willie? What have you done with him?” and did not know whether it had ever happened or if it was some curious halfawake progression of his dream.
Willie will kill Dallas Hardin, he thought. Then, confusedly, no, no. Not Willie, Willie’s dead himself these fifty years. Young Winer will kill him.
He got up. He lit the lamp on the dresser and crossed the room to the chifforobe and opened it. He took down a shoebox and unwrapped the skull from its bed of tissue and looked at it. Course I got to do somethin, he thought. He had thought at first to bury it and be done with it but somehow that had not seemed fitting. It was unfinished, there were too many loose ends. Wrongs needed someone to right them and words ought to be said but he did not feel worthy of saying them.
In the yellow halflight from the coaloil lamp he and the skull formed a curious tableau. Kneeling so before the chifforobe he might have been an acolyte before an oracle, a disciple seeking wisdom from this hard traveler newly raised up from the bowels of the earth. Could it speak, what tales would it tell him? Had it seen its doom? Had its eyes unbelievingly traced the trajectory of the bullet that splintered it?
If he ever finds it out nothin won’t stop him from killin Hardin and he’ll live out his life in the pen, Oliver thought. If I wasn’t soft in the head I’d a killed him myself a long time ago.
5
There were three of them. They were there at first light, coming up the road or simply coalescing out of the mist, the sound that portended their coming clean and clear and halfmusical and lending an anticipatory air to their arrival, though there was only Amber Rose Hovington there to hear them or to see them, sleek and arrogant and graceful, quartering at the road and singlefile following the branch, halting to feed on the dewy clover that grew rankly on the stream’s bank and nuzzling the clear limestone water, raising their heads from their roiled reflections to stare contemptuously at the house, their eyes not yet admitting its existence.
Their steel shoes rang hollowly on the slate, moving on toward the abyss, which had already claimed two heifers that summer. Turning aside only when they came upon what Hardin liked to call his garden, four rows of defeated corn yellowed and bent askew by stormwinds, pale beans wrinkled and dried on their tripod arrangement of sticks. Nothing thriving here save ragweed and Spanish nettles.
“There’s horses in the garden,” she called into the house.
The dry snap of breaking beansticks drew Hardin onto the porch with his coffeecup still in hand. The horses had trampled most of the ruined corn as if scorning whatever poor nourishment it might contain and were at the pole beans, raising their heads and staring toward the sound of the girl’s voice, the stallion disregarding them and turning toward the rich green at the hollow’s mouth.
“Horses I reckon,” Hardin said. “Them’s Morgans. Look at that big beautiful son of a bitch. Ain’t he somethin?” He drained the cup and set it by a porch support and eased into the yard. “Be a shame to see horseflesh like that go end over end down a hole in the ground. Go in there and roust Wymer out. He’s on that old carseat.”
Hardin sat on the doorstep and watched the horses. “Easy now,” he said. He tipped a cigarette from a pack and lit it with a thin gold lighter, sat smoking and turning the lighter in his hands. The lighter was initialed, though the initials were not his own. He had on a pair of tailored slacks and he was barefoot.
The stallion stood facing him across the branch-run, peering up at him cautiously from its lowered head. Hardin watched the smooth, oiled play of its muscles beneath the roancolored hide. “Look at me then,” he told it soothingly. “Get your eyes full, you sweet bastard. Fore this is over you aim to see a lot of me.”
From past weatherboarded walls he could hear the voice of the girl and another voice raised in querulous anger. Sounds of protest, disbelief, anguish. The girl could go get fucked, Hardin learned. Hardin himself could go get fucked. A suggestion Wymer continued to issue indiscriminately and to the world at large. The door opened, the keeperspring creaked it to.
“He won’t come. He just cussed me.”
“The hell he won’t,” Hardin said. He tossed the cigarette into the yard and arose. “You go down there and get me a bucketful of that sweetfeed and bring it here. Go around the far side of the house so you don’t spook them horses.”
He went in. After few moments of silence sounds of commotion arose. The splash of water, cries, curses. The door burst open and a little man ran drunkenly out onto the porch and with Hardin’s now-shod foot to propel him continued down the steps and into the yard. His thin hair was plastered away from a pink baldspot and rheumy gray water dripped off his nose and chin. Half an eggshell was tangled in his hair like some fey adornment. The white shirt he wore was spotted with esoteric bits of food. His hands shaded his eyes as if to shield them from deadly rays. He stood swaying limply for a moment then dropped his hands and stared at the red orb of sun burning away at the mist, peering at it as if he had never seen it at just this angle before.
“Get on up there by that hole and stand,” Hardin told him. “When that girl brings that feed, if she ever does, me and her’ll try to toll em down to the lot. If we can’t we’ll have to drive em. And if you let that big red son of a bitch stumble off in that pit just make damn sure you beat him to the bottom.”
Wymer had his shirttail out wiping his eyes. He raked the dripping wing of hair back out of his face. “Why, shore,” he said. “All you had to do was ask.”
Hardin had the bucket of sweetfeed now and his fist knotted in the stallion’s long auburn mane and he was whispering into its ear. The horse tossed its head in tentative defiance but Hardin’s calm assurance aborted it, its eyes rolled heavenward and his fist knotted tighter, pulling the neck down. He went on whispering, a ripple of motion ran across the horse’s smooth hide. The girl stood by the doorstep watching. Pearl had come out and stood leaning in the doorway. Wymer was waistdeep in the bracken, bent hands to knees peering apprehensively into the weeds for snakes. The voice went on, conspiratorial, equal to equal, halfsoothing, halfobscene banter, dark secrets he shared with the stallion. He took a step, halfturned, his voice coaxing, slackening his grip in the mane, raising the feedbucket to the horse’s muzzle. He took another step toward the stream and this time the stallion’s feet echoed it. They came down the embankment with his arm still about the horse’s neck and into the stream where the horse paused for a moment, had bent to the cold water ripping across the slick black slate. He stroked its shoulder.