Ezra was known throughout the county and beyond as the man to call when you needed something big pulled. This was the source of many crude jokes. The smallest of his oxen stood at just under six feet at the shoulders; the tallest, over seven and a half. The oxen were one of his two passions. The other was baseball, which he followed in the papers every week, nearly committing all of the box scores to memory, so that as he plowed his fields or whipped his team (which he hired out in pairs, from two to the full regiment of sixteen, and which he himself always oversaw), he muttered batting averages and runs batted in and earned- run averages out loud to himself, which, overheard, were simply random-sounding streams of numbers. The statistic that gave Ezra Morrell the most pleasure to contemplate was that of the players' batting averages, and every time he acquired a new ox, he named it after the most recent batting champion from the American League. When he cracked the whip, then, he could be heard variously harassing Ed Delehanty, Elmer Flick, George Stone, Tris Speaker, George Sisler, Harry Heilman, Babe Ruth, one of the three Napoleon Lajoies, or six Ty Cobbs (because he had more oxen than different batting champs, so that when he ran out, he started back at the beginning and named the animals for the different years the same players had won). Hya, Napoleon One, ye dog, lean into it, Ezra would yell. That's no four-twenty-two effort! Unlike other fans of the sport, Ezra took no pleasure in talking about the game with anyone else. When his son dared ask how the great Cobb had fared on the last road trip, Ezra cuffed the boy on the ear, and said, The great Cobb Three has shat his stall full again, ye chatty pup. Now go clean it up before ye're behind with the feed.
George tied Prince Edward to a tree in front of the shed. The inside of the shed felt colder than the outside. Sunlight streamed through cracks between the log cribbing of the walls and seams between boards in the roof where outside the shingles had come loose and blown away. The light flowing in from the roof dropped toward the floor in rectangular planes, which were broken by the heavy rafters. Some of the rafters still had curing hooks hanging from them. There was an abandoned barn swallow's nest in the crook of one of the rafters and a support beam. A dusty hill of droppings remained on the floor beneath the nest.
George stood in the shed. He was suddenly aware that if he was running away, this was not the place to go. To run away meant away. He had never been away. Away was the French Revolution or Fort Sumter or the Roman Empire. Maybe, Boston, three hundred miles south. He had no idea what was in the three hundred miles between here and Boston.
George poked through the pile of ashes and cigarette stubs next to the three nail kegs he and Ray had set up so that each could sit and the cribbage board that George had taken from home could be set between them. He found a butt with two or three drags left to it. He pinched it by the very end. There were no matches. He pitched the cigarette back onto the pile.
A door lay lengthwise against the far wall of the shed. It was from the old Budden place, long since burned down. It was mammoth: made of oak two inches thick. Its hinges and handle had been hacked at. The side facing out into the shed was charred and striated by fire. When George and Ray sat in the shed smoking whatever they had been able to find, which was rolled corn husks as often as it was tobacco, and playing cribbage with the board George had stolen from his own house, they liked to recite the story about the winter of '06, when the snow was twelve feet high and the sun didn't shine for three months and Budden went mad and took the big ax into the house and staved all of the furniture and piled all the broken pieces together in the middle of the parlor and doused it all with kerosene and took a match to it. The hack marks in the door were not from Budden. They were from the volunteer firemen and neighbors (who were the same thing: each a neighbor, each a volunteer firefighter, because you were a fireman if you were a man fighting a fire) who had tried to chop their way through the door to get to Mrs. Budden and the children. By the time they realized that the door was too thick and that they should try to go through a window or the back door, the fire was too ferocious to be able to do anything but leap off the porch. Then, just as they realized this, just as they collectively understood that the door could not be breached, something inside the house exploded and the door wrenched from its hinges and blew outward, plowing the men in front of it, so that they and it landed in the front walkway, they on the ground, it on them-the side which now faced out into the shed burning and gushing smoke. But here was the thing, the reason for the recitation and repetition of the story: When the fire was finally put out, and they found the bodies, Tom Budden's corpse in the kitchen but also one adult (a woman, it was determined) and two children, spooned up against one another within the boundaries of the iron frame of the Budden's big double bed (the mattress, the sheets, the blankets burned away), calm and peace ful as if they were taking an afternoon nap, cooked to smoldering crisps, and whom everybody assumed were Mrs. Budden and the Budden children, and so the town started to make funeral preparations, Mr. Potter measuring the charred corpses as best he could to make the coffins, Mrs. Budden and the children showed up from Worcester, where they had been visiting her mother. No one had ever figured out who that woman and those children were who had been sleeping in the Budden house on the afternoon Tom Budden went berserk and set it all on fire.
George crawled behind the door and lay down. He put his bitten hand against the cold wood and imagined it as scorching hot, imagined it holding back a tremendous fire, which battered and seared it and built up behind it and blew it loose from its hinges. The fire thumped on the other side of the door. George lowered his hand to his lap. He tried to squeeze it into a fist. It was still too sore to fully close. Once again, he fell first to wishing that his father would just disappear from the face of the earth-not die, not be put away, but just miraculously suddenly not be-and then to wishing that his father were a child himself and that he be bitten by his own father, so he could suffer how awful it was to have been attacked by his own sire. George's feelings had moved back and forth between these two thoughts the entire week, except for when he had actually seen his father, who had for the most part stayed away from the house the rest of that week, and had kept to corners and alongside walls and just beyond doorways, like a kicked dog, when he had been home. Whenever George saw his father in the house, he had to keep from crying at being so angry for having a mad father whom he loved and pitied and hated. He tucked his injured hand into his coat and fell asleep. His breath steamed from his half-opened mouth in little clouds, which rolled upward, fragile, and broke apart against the underside of the door.
Kathleen said to Howard, George has run away.
He said, How do you know?
She said, He left Joe alone in the toolshed. He didn't split the wood. He didn't get the water. He didn't help Darla with her numbers. He took Prince Edward and your wagon.
He said, I don't think he'll get too far. He thought, I hope he makes it.
She said, What, exactly, are you going to sell today without your wagon?
He said, Kathleen.
She said, You can borrow Lady Godiva from the Levansellers. He can't be more than two miles away.