— I —
Black water keeps nothing. A man wades through it and it closes up behind him, and by the time you come along there isn't one place left that will say he set his foot there. That was the whole reason Lemuel Baskin had gone down into the Saint Barrow bottoms instead of running north where the roads were. It was the smartest thing he ever did. He'd also quit doing it, and Silas had spent four days finding out how thoroughly.
He'd been on this since spring, picking it up and setting it down, and now it was the night of the thirteenth of July and he was four days into the last of it. Work like that pays nothing at all until it pays. Baskin had gone to ground while the weather was still cool and stayed gone through the planting and the first cutting and on into July, and the paper on him had gone soft in three sheriffs' desks in the meantime. Silas had cut his sign twice up in the parish that spring and lost it both times, once at a road crossing where forty head of cattle came through behind him, and once for no reason he ever worked out, which happens, and which no tracker will admit to.
This last week he'd come at it from the other end. He quit hunting a running man and started hunting a living one, the places a man goes to who can't go to town, and on the fourth day the ground gave him a wheel of paths worn into country that had no business holding one.
Silas Crane had been in the water since a little after dark. The heat didn't go with the sun down there. It came up out of the mud once the light quit and hung in the cypress, and he took it in through his mouth in small amounts, like steam off a kettle. He'd smeared mud along his neck and the backs of his hands before he came off the last dry ground. The mosquitoes found what he missed inside of a minute and had been at him since. He let them be. There was no help for it, and the itch kept him awake, and awake was worth more out here than comfortable.
He walked with his weight back and set the outside of each boot down first and let the ground answer before he gave it anything. Cypress knees stood up under the duckweed like whittled stakes, invisible until they were in a man's shin. Some of the soft places went down farther than a man is tall and had no bottom a boot could find. Every root and half-sunk log out of the water had a cottonmouth lying up on it, and most of them were out of the water. An hour back a bull gator had grunted off to his left, twice. He marked the spot in his head and went around it wide. None of it frightened him in particular. He'd been in enough country like this to know it didn't care one way or the other what happened to him in it.
The frogs were going the whole bottom over. Thousands of them, a racket a man could have talked out loud underneath, and he'd been walking inside it two hours and letting it carry the noise of him.
A running man leaves one line and it goes somewhere. A man who lives in a place wears a wheel, out and back and out again, until the ground gives up and takes the shape.
Silas had found four paths. Three were old, gone soft at the edges and grown back over in the middle. The fourth wasn't. It went out through the cane to a place on the bank where trotlines had been tied and untied so many times that the sapling they were tied to had a groove around it, and it came back the same way, and it had been walked that day. The deep places in it had been walked straight through.
He read that path the better part of an hour, and what he came out with bothered him.
The three old paths went around every bad place. Around the deep water, around the sink holes, around the cottonmouth logs. Whoever wore them in had been careful, and being careful is how a man stays alive out here.
The new path did not go around anything. It went straight through the deep places. It went over the crawfish chimneys instead of stepping past them. Where the man had stopped to rest he had sat down in the wet mud with dry ground four feet away and had not bothered to move to it.
Same man. Same feet. He had been careful for a season and then he had quit.
Silas had seen it before. A man goes on doing the things that keep him alive because he has always done them, running his lines and cooking his food and lying down at dark, and somewhere in there he has quit caring whether any of it works. The doing outlasts the wanting. It is the sign of a man waiting on something to happen to him.
He set it down where he could get at it later.
The prints in the open mud were deep at the heel and dragged long at the toe. Silas crouched and put two fingers down into one. The water in it stood level with the rim and had been standing there a while, and the walls of it had begun to slump the way a print does once the water has had its way with the edges. Ground that wet fills a print like a cup set under a pump, and after it fills it starts taking the print apart. Three hours. Better than three. He'd worked that out as a boy, lying on his belly in the pasture with nothing else to do, watching a cow track fill and counting.
There was other sign and none of it was careful. Crushed crawfish chimneys where the man had gone straight through instead of around. Green scuffed pale off the top of a cypress knee where a boot passed over and didn't lift enough. A place where he'd sat down in the mud with his back against a gum tree and stayed a while, and hadn't troubled to get himself up onto anything dry to do it.
Sixty dollars, federal, for Lemuel Baskin delivered alive. The notice was folded in the saddlebag up on the ridge where the ground was still ground, because paper carried down into this country turns to pulp before morning. Silas had the face and he had the name and there was nothing else on it worth wet feet. Sixty dollars was coffee and salt and a keg of nails and quinine ahead of the sick season, and it was some part of what Vina had been asking him for since spring without ever once calling it asking.
The notice said murder. Notices said murder. But he'd read that name against the post office wall in Mourning Bend and then read it again, and stood there in the road with the paper open a good while longer than four lines take.
He knew a Lemuel Baskin. Not well. Well enough. Thirteen years back and better, they'd been in the same command through Tennessee and into Arkansas, and Baskin was one of the men a man was glad to see coming when the picket changed. He wasn't loud. He came to a fire late and left it before the talk got good, and he carved. That was what Silas had kept of him. A folding knife and whatever cottonwood came to hand, and he'd sit off the light working at a bird or a dog and hand it to somebody without much said about it, and there was a stretch that winter when half the company had one in a pocket. They'd shared coffee maybe six times in eleven months and Baskin never once talked about anybody waiting on him, which Silas had noticed at the time because every other man in that command talked about nothing else. He did what he was told and did it right and didn't make a show of having done it.
And now there was a dead federal agent behind his name.
Silas had turned that over two days and gotten nothing out of it worth the turning. Men come home to nothing and go bad in it. That happens every week in this parish and it doesn't need a reason written down anywhere. It sat in him crooked the whole way south all the same.
Baskin would know him. Every man out of those years did. Silas had watched it happen enough times to know the shape of it, a man placing him across a room and going still, and then finding somewhere else to be, and not once in all that time had one of them looked at him a second time.
He knew what was said about him. He had heard most of it from strangers, in barrooms and at fires, told to him as a thing that happened somewhere else to somebody else, because the men telling it had no way of knowing who they were telling. He had let them finish. He had heard it told worse than it was and he had heard it told better, and he had never once heard it told false.
There was nothing to ask anybody. He had quit expecting the stories to be wrong a long time ago.
None of which changed the work. He'd have come after the man if he'd never laid eyes on him. He was coming after him now, and he'd put him on a horse and walk him back to Mourning Bend breathing, and that was honest enough that he could take the money afterward without having to sit down and argue himself into it.
The timber opened and he came out at the edge of a flat where the water lay wide and still with the moon all the way down on it.
Then it was not the flat.
He was kneeling in shallow water with his hands around a man's throat and the man was in blue and had been in the water some while, because the current was moving his hair. Silas took his hands away. The marks stayed. The man's face was turned up out of the water at nothing and his mouth was open and there was no question at all about what he was.
Silas looked up.
The whole of it had stopped. There was no firing anywhere along that bank and none from the bluff and none from the boat, and out past the bar the gunboat stood with her ports shut and did nothing at all. The smoke was lying flat along the ground the way smoke lies when the air won't take it up. Up on the slope men were moving around in it, and he could hear them, and they were not shouting or calling to each other. They were talking low. They sounded like men walking through a house where somebody had died.
Then it was the flat again, and he was standing in water to his shins with his hand closed on the rifle hard enough that the old scar across his left knuckle pulled, and his heart going like he had run somewhere.
He got his teeth apart. Cypress. Duckweed. One dead willow leaning out over the shallows. He looked at it until that was all it was.
It came apart on him before he could get hold of any one piece. It always did. He'd gone at them for a while, years back, and got exactly nothing, and then he quit going at them, and then he found he was doing it anyway, the way a man leaves a bad tooth alone and looks up and his tongue is on it again. Baskin was ahead of him. He went on.
The smell reached him from a good way out and it was nothing the swamp made. Cold grease. Old smoke off a fire dead for hours. Under it the particular sourness of a man who's been in the same clothes for a season and has no plans about it.
The light came out of a hunter's shed, set up on cypress pilings where the flat gave way to deeper water, the pilings walked crooked in the mud over the years until one corner had gone down and taken the roof with it. Moss had the shingles. The whole of it leaned toward the water, and one more season was going to have it. The door hung so wrong on its frame that it stood off a hand's width at the bottom and wouldn't have shut if a man put his shoulder into it, and out of that gap the candlelight came and lay long across the black water.
Off the downstream side somebody had been throwing things into the shallows for months. Tins, bones, a stove lid, the wreck of a chair. It had built up until it showed above the water at the low end and the flies had found it and stayed.
A pirogue was shoved up on the mud under the near side, not tied. The water had been working at it a good while and had it half turned around already, and a few more hours would have had it out in the flat and gone. It was the one thing in that country that could carry a man out of it. He ran his lines out of it and fetched whatever he fetched. He'd stepped out of it and walked off and left it to the river.
Silas looked at that a while. He'd have known better what to make of a gun laid across the sill. Whatever it was, it went with the rest of it, and he closed the last of the distance.
A windfall cypress lay forty yards off the door and he put himself down behind the trunk. The bowie he swung around behind his hip so it wouldn't catch when he went flat. His coat was wet through and cold against his ribs, and inside it his hand found the bone handle of his mother's knife through the shirt and came back out again. He didn't know he'd done it. He'd been doing it most of his life.
The Henry had a round in it already. He'd worked the lever back at the ridge an hour ago and let the hammer down to half-cock, because a lever thrown outside a man's door gives that man everything he needs for the next few seconds. The brass he'd rubbed down with mud along with everything else.
He settled in to watch. There was no count on it and no hurry in him. The candle bent and stood up. A board inside took a man's weight and let it go, then took it again in the same place, which is a man sitting and shifting and not going anywhere. No horse anywhere on the flat. One man's sign in the mud and nobody else's.
Then the frogs stopped.
Not a patch of them, and not a ring of quiet running out from something moving through. Every frog quit in the same instant, out to the far timber and past it, as far as a man could hear, like the whole of it had been told at once.
Nothing else changed, and that was the worst of it. The mosquitoes were still at his ears. Water went on tapping at the pilings under the shed, small and hollow. Behind him a limb let go of its water and dripped and dripped again. Only the frogs were gone, and they were gone whole. He'd heard frogs quit for a heron, for a snake, for a man walking, for weather coming, and every time in his life it had traveled. One patch and then the next, and it filled in behind. This didn't fill in behind. He counted sixty, and counted sixty again, and the quiet held.
Inside the shed the candle bent over and came back. The board took weight and this time didn't let it go.
Silas came up off the ground low, with the Henry in both hands and the muzzle out of the mud, and went down into the clearing.
— II —
He came up the pilings on the downstream side where the wreck of the chair was, because a man who has been listening at a door all evening listens toward the path, and Silas had not come by the path. The boards took him without saying much. At the corner he stood off the wall a moment with the water going hollow underneath and the quiet still lying over the whole flat, and then he put his boot in the gap under the door and took the door with his shoulder and it went in. It had never been hung right to begin with.
The candle was on a nail keg. There was a man on a pallet with his back against the wall and his knees up, and Silas had the Henry on him before the door finished swinging.
It was Baskin, and he had known it would be since the post office wall in the spring. Eleven months in the same army and neither of them had ever had much to say to the other. Picket twice. The beard was new. Everything under it sat where he had left it, the shape of the head, the set of the jaw, the way the man came off a wall.
In Baskin it came up whole.
He did not speak. Something came into his face and kept coming, and for the length of one breath he was somewhere else. Then he was back, and the revolver had been lying by his hip on the blanket and it was in his hand and up and firing before he was all the way back into the room.
Silas was not there. He could not have said afterward when he had started to move. Something in the man's shoulder had gone before the arm did, a gather across the top of it no bigger than a breath, and Silas had already put himself off the line of it and down along the wall with the Henry still up, and the ball went through the doorframe where his chest had been and out into the flat and the sound of it filled the shed and rang in the tin and went away over the water.
It went through him after. That was the part he did not like. The moving had come first and the knowing had come along behind it and caught up, and for a piece of a second he was standing there holding a rifle, entirely unhurt, with no account of how he had got out of the way.
Baskin's face had nothing in it but fear. Pure, and stupid with it, no more thought in it than a horse has going over backward. And then it turned over. Silas watched it turn. Whatever was behind that face got hold of something and the fear went to another kind of fear altogether, the kind a man carries out of a church, and Baskin's mouth came open and the revolver hung in his hand forgotten.
"What are you," he said.
Silas said nothing.
"What kind of evil are you." He was not asking for information. His voice had gone thin and reasonable, a man working out loud. "Is that what you are. Is that the thing you are."
Then he leaned over and set the revolver down on the boards, careful, with both hands. He pushed it away from himself with two fingers and it turned and stopped against the leg of the keg.
"I'm sorry," Baskin said. "I'm sorry. It weren't you coming in on me that done it. It was knowing."
Silas kept the Henry where it was.
Then Baskin laughed. It came up out of him in one piece and quit as fast as it started, and what was in his face after it was worse than what had been there before.
"Did you know." He said it flat, not like a question. "That's what I want off you. Did you know what they was going to take. You must have knowed. You stood there and told me you'd come and here you are, so you had the whole of it before it ever happened. Did you know it'd be more than a man could hold. Did you know I'd have to carry it and keep on carrying it."
His face had not changed but the water was running off his jaw and onto his shirt, and he did not put a hand up to it. Silas did not think he knew it was happening.
"Was you part of it. Was you part of the evil that took it off me." He waited a moment on that and did not appear to expect anything to come back. "Or was you the other thing all along and I never had the sense to see it. I can't tell no more. I ain't been able to tell for thirteen year."
His mouth worked and did not get anything out of it for a moment.
"I reckon it don't matter now which you was."
He did not stop after that for a long time, and none of it was aimed at getting anything from Silas. It went where it went.
"They ain't a way to say how much was took," he said. "And it weren't took off me alone. It come off other folks too, folks that never had nothing to do with nothing. It was like all the evil there is got gathered up and made into the one thing and set down on us."
The candle stood up straight and burned.
"They was doing all manner of things down in the settlement." He put his head back against the boards. "All manner of things and not one of them good. Taking ground. Moving folks off ground. Folks going out of the bottom road and no man ever asked after them." His face worked. "She seen it. She knowed what they was up to. She knowed they was doing wrong and hurting people and she seen who, and that's why. That's the whole of why. She seen it, and they couldn't have her seeing it."
He said she, and he did not say who.
Silas heard it and put it away whole, the same as he had put away the paths back in the bottoms. A woman in the settlement had known something about men doing wrong and had died of knowing it. He did not turn it over. He put it where it went.
"I didn't know it could be like this. I want you to understand that I could not have imagined it."
He got that far and stopped, and something went through him from the belly up and shut his throat, and he sat with his mouth open and nothing coming out of it until it let him go. When it did he went on in the same voice, as though there had been no interruption at all.
"I had thirteen year of being afraid of you. Thirteen year. Fifty-one years old and I laid awake through better than a quarter of them over what you might do to me when you come."
He made a small sound that was not quite the laugh again.
"And then it come, and it weren't me at all. It was them." He was looking at Silas now the way a man looks at water he means to go into. "And I'd have give you every one of them thirteen year and every year after, and stood still and let you do whatever it was you had a mind to do, if it'd have bought them a Tuesday."
The candle bent and stood up.
"They took everything that was good and they left a thing sitting where it was, and it ain't been long enough for me to learn how to carry it. I don't believe there's a way to learn it."
His hands had opened on his knees and lifted.
"So you're here. Evil or not, you're here. You told me I could trade the one pain for the other. There ain't nothing in this world I want more than that."
The frogs had not started up again. Silas noticed it and let it go.
"I'm taking you in alive," he said.
Baskin's hands stayed open in the air where they had been.
"Alive," he said.
"That's right."
"Alive." He turned the word over like he was hunting the flaw in it, and when he did not find one his voice began to come up. "I seen you at Fort Pillow. That's the one I seen with my own eyes, and I ain't ever put it down since. I stood there and watched you do it."
Silas said nothing.
"The rest I only heard. Poison Spring, they said. Then Jenkins' Ferry a couple weeks behind it. Then Brice's Cross Roads come summer. That's all it ever was to me, was hearing it, a thing a man tells you at a fire and you say is that so." He had come forward off the wall without seeming to know it. "They said more than a regiment. That's what come down the line. More than a regiment, and it kept coming down and it never come back up."
"You killed women," he said. "You killed children. Them people never done one thing to nobody, and every one of them got a quicker end than you're fixing to give me."
He was up on his knees now.
"So say it out. What is it about me. Them people got the thing I'm asking you for and they never asked for it, and I've asked, and you'll stand there and tell me no. I want to hear the reason. I want to hear it in your own mouth."
Silas gave him nothing.
Something went out of his face then.
"You promised." It came up out of him loud enough to carry across the water. "You said you'd take it off me. You said it and I have carried it and you're going to stand there."
He came off the pallet at Silas with a sound Silas had heard men make before and had never got used to.
There was not much to it. Baskin was fifty-one and had been eating what he could catch since spring and he came in with his hands and nothing else. Silas turned the rifle and took him across the chest with the flat of it and put him down on the boards, and got a knee across the back of his shoulders, and had the wrists behind him and the cord on them in about the time it takes to say it. He did not hit him after the first. There was no call for it.
Baskin lay with his cheek in the dust and kept talking.
"You could have," he said. "You could have and you won't."
Silas worked the knot and checked it against the wrist and left it a finger loose, because a man walks better with blood in his hands.
"All that. All them people. And you won't do the one."
Silas got him sitting up against the wall, and then went and picked the revolver up off the floor and broke it open and shook the loads into his palm and put them in his coat and the revolver in his belt. He put the candle out with his fingers. He took the blanket off the pallet, because it was going to be a long walk and the man had nothing.
"Where's the woman," Baskin said suddenly, and Silas did not know what he meant and did not ask.
"On your feet."
"You ain't said one word about any of it."
"No."
"You ain't said it's a lie."
Silas got a hand under his arm and stood him up.
"Whatever happened before," he said, "this here is what's happening now."
He took him out through the door he had broken, down the pilings and onto the mud where the pirogue lay half turned in the shallows, and put him ahead on the path where he could see him, and started him walking north through the black water toward the ridge and the horse and the road, alive.
— III —
They came out of the water a little after sunup on the fourteenth and the sun went all the way over them and started down the other side before the ground came up hard under their feet. It took the whole day, which was about what Silas had figured on. A bound man walks badly. A bound man who has quit wanting to get anywhere walks worse. Twice Silas had to put him back on his feet, and once he cut the wrists loose and let him go a mile with his hands in front of him because the shoulders had gone white, and then tied them behind again without either of them saying anything about it.
Baskin talked for the first part of the day and then quit, and the quitting was worse company than the talk.
He talked with his head down and his shoulders working against the cord and he did not once look to see whether Silas was listening, which Silas took to mean it was not for him. It came out in no order. A man would have had to walk behind him a week to put it together, and Silas walked behind him one day and did not try.
"They had it worked out," Baskin said, somewhere in the first hour. "Down in the bottom. It weren't no accident how it went. Man gets his ground and works it two year and then there's paper against it he never signed, and then there's men at his door about the paper, and then he ain't there no more and somebody else has got the ground. And you ask where'd he go and folks look at their hands."
Later, out of nothing: "Wasn't only ground, neither."
And later still, after a long stretch of only the water: "Folks went off that bottom road and didn't come back and there wasn't no sheriff ever rode down there about it. Not one time. You know how many times a sheriff come down that road in six year." He did not say the number. He seemed to lose interest in it.
He came at Silas sideways and never straight on.
"I been trying to work out what you are," he said, around midday, when they had come up out of the deep water onto a spine of dry ground and Silas had let him sit. "I had thirteen year at it and I ain't no closer."
Silas gave him the canteen and Baskin drank and gave it back with his two hands together.
"See, if you're a devil then it's simple. A devil does what a devil does and there ain't no arguing with the weather." He wiped his mouth on his shoulder. "But a devil don't put a rope on a man and walk him to a courthouse. That ain't devil's work. That's a job." He said the word like it offended him. "So then I think, all right, then he's the other thing. Sent. And a sent thing does the terrible part because it's got to, and it don't know no more than I do why."
"Get up," Silas said.
"And then I think about them people," Baskin said, getting up. "And I can't make it come out."
The afternoon he spent mostly on it.
"You reckon a thing can be sent and still be evil? I mean the same thing. Both at once." A while later: "I asked a preacher that. Not about you. Just the general question." A while after that: "He didn't like it."
And once, with no warning and no heat in it at all: "She'd have knowed. She could look at a man one time."
That was the only time he came near it on the road, and he went around it and did not come back.
Toward the last of the light he quit.
Silas had nothing to say to any of it and said nothing, and he did not decide to say nothing; there was simply nothing in him that answered. He walked and watched the man's feet and the ground ahead and the timber on both sides. But he found late in the day that he had kept some of it. The ground and the paper against it. The men at the door. A woman who could look at a man one time. He had not meant to keep any of it and he had it anyway, laid up where he laid up sign, and he did not take it out and look at it.
Mourning Bend sits up on the last high ground before the parish goes to water. From the ridge road it is a gray line of roofs and a courthouse cupola and the two brick chimneys of the gin, and below all of it the Saint Barrow comes around the bend it is named for, wide and the color of coffee with milk in it, carrying whatever the upcountry has sent down that week. There were three flatboats tied at the landing and a stern-wheeler working her way up against the current with her stack going, and the whole town sloped toward the water like everything in it had been dropped there and rolled.
Silas brought the horse down the ridge with Baskin walking at the stirrup.
The town let them come. Men on the gallery of the store quit talking and watched them the length of the street and started up again after. A woman took hold of a boy by the shirt and moved him back off the walk without looking at him. That was all. Mourning Bend had seen bounty men before and would see them again, and there is no crowd for a thing people have already decided about.
Off east, down the slope past the gin and across the low ground, the Freedmen's settlement had its own lights coming up in its own windows, forty or fifty of them scattered along the bottom road, close enough to see from the courthouse steps and far enough that no one in the courthouse had to. There was a church down there with a bell in a frame beside it instead of a steeple. Silas had heard it on a Sunday once from the ridge and had gone on riding.
The sheriff's office was one room and a back cell off the courthouse's north side, and Dupree was not in it. The deputy was. He came up off the desk with a pen still in his hand and ink on three fingers and his hair parted so sharp it looked cut with a rule, and he got to the door and stopped there and looked at Baskin a while.
"That him."
"That's him."
"Sheriff's upriver." Shaw wiped his fingers on his trousers, which did nothing for them. "Went up day before yesterday on the Prentiss business and ain't back. Tomorrow, they say, but they been saying tomorrow."
"I'll wait on him."
"You'll wait on him," Shaw agreed. He looked past Silas at the cell door and then did not look at it again, and Silas understood the situation before the deputy got around to it. "I ain't got the cell. There's a man in it out of the settlement and I ain't turning him out at dark into this town, and I ain't putting your man in there with him neither, not with what's on his paper."
"Then where."
"Odalie's got a storeroom." Shaw said it plain, without any of the sideways a young man might have put on it. "Timber all round, no window, one door, a post in the middle of it she keeps for a reason. She'll take money for it and she'll take money for feeding him. That storeroom's held drunks and it's held worse and it ain't lost one yet. I'd sooner have him behind that padlock than in here with the man I've already got."
Baskin had not looked up through any of it.
"Two nights, maybe," Shaw said. "You'll want to be there yourself."
"I intended to be."
"Down at the low end past the gin. You'll hear it before you see it." Shaw put the pen down for the first time. "I'll walk you as far as the corner. She'll want to know I sent you and not the other way around."
They went down the middle of the street because the walk was too narrow for three men and one of them roped. Shaw stopped at the corner by the gin and pointed with two fingers and did not go any farther, and Silas took the horse and Baskin the rest of the way down alone, past a shut store and a house with somebody eating supper in it, and the ground kept tilting toward the river the whole way.
Odalie Prejean's stood at the low end of the street where the ground started for the river, a long house with a gallery on two sides and a wash-kitchen and stable out back and a lamp already burning over the front steps though the sun was not all the way gone. There was music in the front of the house. Somebody was playing badly and enjoying it.
Odalie came out to the yard rather than have any of it come in her front door. She was tall. She took the two of them in from the bottom step and she spent longer on Baskin.
"What'd he do."
"Killed a Bureau man, they say."
"They say." Her hair was pinned up loose and coming down on one side and she left it. "How long."
"Till Dupree's back. Two nights, could be."
"Four dollars the storeroom. Dollar a day his food and I'll not have him fed on anything I'd put in front of a paying man. Your bed's a dollar and your horse is two bits and if you want washing done that's separate." It came out in one piece, worn smooth from use. "And I keep the key."
"You keep the key."
"I keep the key," she said. "It's my building and there's people asleep in it."
Silas counted it out of the roll in his coat and put it in her hand and she put it away without counting it again.
The storeroom was off the back of the wash-kitchen, close-boarded, no window, one door on a hasp with a good padlock. Sacked meal and a barrel of lard and a shelf of jars, and up under the roof at the far end a loft with a ladder to it. In the middle of the floor a cedar post ran from the boards to the roof beam and the bark had been off it a long time and it was rubbed dark at about the height of a man's hands.
Silas put Baskin against the post and made the rope fast to it and then went around behind and checked his own work by feel, the same as he would a cinch.
"He'll need to lie down."
"There's a pallet," Odalie said. "He'll lie down when he lies down."
Baskin let it all happen to him. He had gone somewhere and his face was doing nothing at all now, and he sat down at the foot of the post with his hands behind it and his legs out in front of him like a man on a porch.
"Somebody ought to look in on him," Silas said. "Past the middle of the night. A man tied up can turn a wrong way and choke on himself and it don't take much."
"Celestine goes through after midnight anyhow." Odalie turned the padlock over in her hand. "She'll look."
She locked it and put the key in her apron, and then she stood there with her hand flat over the pocket and looked at him properly for the first time since he rode in.
"Wash before you eat. There's a pump and there's soap in the kitchen."
"All right."
"It ain't for your sake. You come in here under four days of that country and I couldn't see what I'd took money off of." She said it the way she had said the price of the room. "You're Crane off the Blackwood."
"I am."
"I know the place. Been Crane ground since before either of us was thought of." She had not moved off the step. "Cephas Pell comes down here of a Saturday when he's got money and half the time when he ain't. He's sixty if he's a day and he sets in my front room and talks to the girls till they run him off, and he's never once been any trouble to me. That's all I'll say about who works your land, except that everybody comes through that door gets the same from me and always has."
Silas said nothing.
"And I've heard about you." She let that sit. "Not from him. From soldiers, both sides of it, for going on ten year now. There ain't a man ever come through here that fought in that war who didn't have something to say about Crane when he'd had enough to drink. Most feared man on either side, is how it generally goes. Some of them told it like a ghost story."
"People talk."
"They do." Her eyes went over him again, unhurried, taking her time about it. "But standing here looking at you, I don't see it. I was expecting something out of a bad dream. Some kind of ogre. And here's a tall dark-headed man with a good face on him and mud to his knees, and them are working hands, not a clerk's. I can generally tell what a man does by the time he's through the door. You I couldn't."
"That's how tall tales go."
"I reckon it is." She did not sound convinced, and she did not press it. "Dark-headed men mostly go to seed by thirty. You've kept."
"I've got two upstairs would come down them steps sideways for you, and both of them would charge you wrong on purpose." Something moved at one corner of her mouth and did not get any further. "Or I'll bring the plate down myself. It's been a slow week and I don't do that except when I care to."
"Just the supper."
"Suit yourself," Odalie said, with no offense anywhere in it, and went on up toward the house.
Silas stood a minute in the yard listening to the bad piano and to somebody laughing at the bad piano.
He took the side room off the kitchen. It had a bed and a table and a lamp and a window looking out at the stable, and he did not take his boots off in it, then or later.
The girl brought his supper at full dark. She was young, nineteen or twenty, slender, with her hair tied back off her face with a bit of twine, and she came in with the plate and a cup and set both down and did not linger the way some of them lingered.
"Miss Odalie says you paid for the beans and the rest of it's mine to give or not."
"Then I'm obliged."
"It's cornbread," she said. "It ain't nothing."
"You'd be Celestine."
"I would."
It was beans and a piece of salt pork and the cornbread, and he ate it sitting on the edge of the bed because the chair had another use coming. Celestine stood a moment in the door with the tray against her hip.
"He tied good? That man out there?"
"He is."
"He was hollering some, before dark."
"He'll quiet."
She thought about that. Then she nodded, once. "My girl's asleep up in the loft, over the storeroom. Ruthie. Try not to wake her, if you go past."
Silas looked up. "How old."
"Five. Six in the fall." Something came into her face that she did not particularly try to keep out of it, and went. "She sleeps through most anything, but she don't sleep through hollering."
"I'll go quiet."
"All right, then." She took the tray and went out and pulled the door to behind her, and he heard her go down the boards of the gallery and heard the kitchen door and then the house took her.
Silas finished the beans. He sat a while with the cup. Then he got up and did what he did.
The chair came out from under the table and went against the door with the back under the latch, tipped just so, so that it stood on its own and would not stand if the door moved a quarter inch. Out of his coat came the spool. He unwound a length of black thread and tied it off on the leg of the washstand and drew it across the doorway at about the height of his ankle bone and made it fast to a nail head in the far wall, and pulled it until it sang and then let it back off until it did not. The bowie came off his hip and went sheathed on the table with the hilt pointed away from the bed, away from where his hand would fall.
He wet the ball of his thumb and drew a mark through the black on the lamp brass at the line the oil stood at, and looked at it, and sat down on the bed.
Last was his mother's knife. He took it out from inside his coat and turned the lamp up and looked at the edge, the whole length, heel to point, turning it into the light. Then he turned it over and did the spine the same way and came back down the edge again, slow, the second time.
There was nothing wrong with it. There had not been anything wrong with it in thirteen years.
He put it under the pillow and turned the lamp down to a bead and lay back on top of the covers with his boots on and his hands crossed on his chest.
The house went on a while. The piano quit. Somebody said something in the hall and somebody else laughed at it, and a door went, and after that there was only the frogs down along the slough behind the wash-kitchen, going strong the way they had been going every night of his life, and the river beyond them.
He was tireder than he had let himself know. Four days in that country and a night in the water and a whole day on the road with a man on a rope, and it all came up over him at once now that there was nothing left to hold off.
Silas Crane slept.
— IV —
Silas knelt on the storeroom floor with both hands dark to the wrists.
The room had gone cold. Split sapwood cut through the copper smell, and beneath both lay the greasy smoke of a tallow lamp guttering near its end.
Blood had dried in the lines of Silas's knuckles and across the old scar on his left hand. More sat black under his nails. His gray shirt was stiff from cuff to elbow and wet against the belly. He stayed on one knee and looked.
Baskin was tied to the cedar post. The rope had not been loosened. His arms were drawn behind him until both shoulders stood wrong beneath the shirt, one worse than the other, the flesh swollen around the joint.
His mouth had been filled. Not gagged. Grain-sack burlap wound tight in twine had been driven in and packed down and more driven in after it, and then more, past what a jaw will open to, past what the skin will do, until the skin quit. It tore. Both corners went back along the bone to the hinge of the jaw and kept going, and what was left of his face below the nose was not a mouth any longer but an opening torn to the width of the hand that made it and stuffed to the back of the throat. The jaw hung off its joint. Burlap stood out of the torn edges, dark and stiff and dry. Whatever sound he made had died in the room.
Dozens of cuts crossed him from collarbone to hip, some thin enough to close on themselves, others opened to the bone. The spacing held even from the first to the last. His left hand was short three fingers, each taken at a different knuckle, clean through. They were not on the floor. His eyelids were gone. His head had been tipped back against the post and held there, and his face was toward the open room.
Celestine lay near the doorway. The blood ran back from her toward the middle of the room. The table had been shoved aside. One chair was down against the wall. Both wrists were banded deep where rope had been. There was no rope on her. Her dress was torn at one shoulder and dragged crooked across her body. The boards beneath her were slick in places and tacky in others, blood laid down, disturbed, and dried again.
Four pale gouges marked the cedar doorframe beside her. Her nails had broken back to the quick. Her throat was open, one cut, deep and sure.
At the foot of the ladder, straw had been crushed flat and gone dark. A small dress lay in it, soaked through, one sleeve half torn and twisted tight. There was no child.
Beside the dress stood a figure carved from raw willow, no longer than Silas's thumb. A girl in a plain shift, the head tilted a little to one side. The cuts were fresh enough that pale wood showed wet at the deepest places. Blood had been pressed into a narrow groove around the neck.
Silas's bootprints crossed the room between the bodies. Heel and worn left sole, the same length of stride all the way across, nothing skidded and nothing turned short.
His Henry leaned against the wall near the table. His bowie lay unsheathed on the floor, clean. His mother's knife rested beside it with pale curls of willow caught at the guard.
Silas rose. His knees worked, and his hands did not shake. He did not touch the torn dress.
The lamp fluttered. Whenever the flame lowered, the room went colder. Silas went to the carving and took it between two fingers, careful of the wet wood. The small face had almost no features, only a cut for the mouth and two shallow pits for eyes. One shoulder sat higher than the other. A strip of bark remained along the back like dark hair. He held it there, then slid it inside his coat beside the sheath of his mother's knife.
The figure struck the bone handle when he moved. A small wooden click.
Silas lifted the knife from the floor. Willow sap dulled the blade near the point. Fine shavings clung around the guard and in the seam where bone met metal. He wiped the blade once on his trouser leg and sheathed it.
The room had to be changed before the lamp went out. He found a canvas feed sack folded beneath the lowest shelf. Baskin would fit if the legs were drawn. Silas cut the rope from the post, lowered the body onto the straw, and pulled the burlap out of him. It came free with two teeth caught in the twine. He left them in it and folded the knot into the sack.
Baskin's arms would not come forward. Silas worked one carefully enough to clear the post, then the other. The ruined shoulder shifted under the shirt. No sound came from the man now.
He rolled Baskin onto the canvas and wrapped him tight. Iron trace-chain hung from a peg beside the shelves. Silas wound it around the sack at the chest and knees. From the yard he brought two river stones kept near the wash-kitchen for holding down a barrel lid. He bound one against Baskin's ribs and the other at the ankles.
The lamp burned lower while he worked on Celestine. Silas spread burlap beside her and lifted her shoulders first. Her head turned with the movement. He set it straight before drawing the cloth around her. One broken nail remained caught in the doorframe, a thin crescent turned dark at the root.
He bound the burlap with trace-chain and fixed a stone at one shoulder, another below the knees. Her weight settled unevenly when he lifted. He changed his grip and carried her to the door.
The padlock lay open on the floor outside. The key was in it. Silas looked toward the dark house. No lamp showed in the kitchen. A man laughed somewhere in the front rooms and was hushed. The yard stood empty.
He carried Celestine behind the wash-kitchen to the slough. The bank fell steep under willow roots. Current worked the outside bend, black water sliding against mud deep enough to take a pole without finding bottom. Silas set the bundle down, went back for Baskin, and laid him beside her. He listened before moving either one.
The stable horses shifted in their stalls. Water ran through the slough. From the main house came a low bedframe knock, then quiet. Silas lowered Baskin first and fed the chain through his hands until the canvas touched water. The current took hold and pulled the legs downstream. Silas let another foot of chain slip, then released it. The stones drew the body under. Canvas showed pale once beneath the water, rolled, and vanished into the cut bank.
Celestine went deeper along the same bend. The burlap darkened as it entered the water. One fold caught on a willow root. Silas went down to the knee, freed it, and pushed until the current turned the bundle away. The chain followed with a brief iron whisper. He stood at the bank until the water lay flat again.
The dress was still where it had fallen. He found a smaller grain sack and lifted the dress by the torn sleeve. Blood had soaked it heavy and cold. The hem dragged across the straw, leaving a narrow line.
He put it in the sack, added a length of chain and a stone, and carried it to the slough. The bundle was small enough to lower with one hand. It sank without turning.
He watched the last air rise in three bubbles. The current broke them and took them downstream.
Back in the storeroom, the lamp went out. Silas worked in darkness until he found a second tallow dip on the shelf and lit it from a coal in the wash-kitchen stove. The new flame reached the blood beyond the chaff and the drag marks crossing the floor. He started with the bootprints, spreading clean chaff over each one from the post across the blood. Straw went over the darkest pools. He used a broom to scatter it without leaving a new pattern. Where blood had dried to the boards, he did not waste time trying to erase the color. Too much scrubbing would show its own work.
He carried lye from the wash-kitchen and mixed it in a bucket. At the threshold he scrubbed until the wood lightened a shade. He worked the brush with the grain, washed the worst of the drag mark, then threw the water into the slough well below the bundles.
The table had already been moved. He shoved it farther out of true and laid the second chair on its side. A crock came down from the shelf and broke near the post. Grain spilled through the blood and stuck there.
The door was the last of it. The hasp locked from outside. If Baskin had escaped, the break had to read from within. He set the dip down on the boards and got low to the plate and put his heel against it and drove outward. The screws tore loose from the wood. He struck it again until the plate bent and one staple pulled free.
High on the cedar a small hand had caught the frame and slid the width of four fingers and left what was on it. The dip was on the floor. The light did not go up that far.
The sound carried into the yard. Silas waited, but no door opened at the house.
The hasp he set where it would hang crooked, and closed the storeroom door as far as it would go. The gap remained wide enough for a hand.
He returned the opened padlock to the ground beneath it. The key went into the dirt near the threshold, where it could be found and read as dropped during struggle.
Inside, the blood still told more than he wanted. Straw over the worst of it, a crock down and broken by the post, a chair on its side, a door driven out from within.
The Henry came up off the wall and he wiped the stock. The bowie went back into its sheath. He checked beneath the table and around the post for anything that belonged to him.
At the base of the ladder, the straw stayed crushed where the dress had been. He raked it once with his boot and moved on.
Baskin's pallet had been dragged half out from the post. Silas pushed it square against the boards with his boot. A thin edge of white lay under the near corner where the ticking met the floor, and the straw he had spread came down over the rest of it.
The yard pump groaned when Silas worked the handle. Water came rusty first, then clear and cold. He washed his hands beneath the spout. Black ran from the nails in threads. He used lye soap, scrubbed the old scar, worked beneath each nail with the point of a splinter, then washed again.
Blood had gone through the gray shirt. He stripped it off beside the pump. Night air touched his skin.
He drew his mother's knife and held it beneath the pump. Water loosened the pale willow shavings caught around the guard. He picked them out one at a time. Sap clung near the point. He rubbed it away with soap and the heel of his hand until the blade shone clean.
The carving knocked softly against its sheath inside his coat hanging from the pump handle. Silas did not take it out.
He wrapped the gray shirt around a stone and tied it with cord. The bundle went into the slough above the bodies, where the current carried it beneath the willow roots. He waited until it was gone.
A clean shirt lay folded in his saddlebag at the stable. He crossed the yard bare to the waist with his coat closed over him. Mud had dried on his trousers. That could belong to the bottoms and did not need explaining.
The stable smelled of hay, horse sweat, and leather. His horse lifted its head from the manger and watched him approach. A boy slept on a cot in the tack room with one boot on and the other beneath it. The lantern beside him had burned low.
Silas took the clean shirt from the saddlebag and buttoned it in the stall. He combed his damp hair back with his fingers and put on the coat. The willow figure settled beside the knife against his ribs. He saddled the horse without lighting another lamp. The boy stirred when the cinch ring clicked.
"Who's that?"
"Crane."
The boy raised his head. His eyes opened halfway. "Leaving?"
"Yes."
"Sheriff ain't back."
"I'll meet him later."
The boy looked toward the stable door, where the sky remained dark. "Ain't five yet."
Silas led the horse out. "Go back to sleep."
The boy did.
Silas mounted in the alley and turned north. No one stood on the porch at Odalie's. The red glass lantern had gone out. Behind the house, the storeroom sat with its door hanging crooked and a thin new light showing at the eastern edge of the roofs.
He rode without hurrying. Mourning Bend fell behind him. The road climbed past the last houses, then ran between cane fields and dark timber. The horse's hooves struck dry ground with a steady four-beat sound.
Before dawn, Silas was three miles north. No one had seen his hands.
— V —
Three miles north of town he turned the horse off the ridge road and went back down the other way.
He came into the low country south of Mourning Bend from the east side, well below the slough, and put in an hour before there was any light at all. He was not in a hurry. There was a thing that had to be there in the morning and it had to be there the way such things are when nobody has made them, and that is not work a man does fast.
He went on foot where it mattered. A man running in the dark with a child does not run clean. He goes through the wet places instead of around because he cannot see them, and he catches his shoulder on cane and breaks it forward, and where the ground softens he stops being careful about it. Silas put that down along a line running southwest toward the water, and he put it down in the order it would have happened in, and he did not put down more of it than a man would leave. Two places he went back and took some of it away, because there was more there than there ought to have been.
He set a heel in one soft place and drew the toe long, the way a man's foot goes when he is carrying weight in front of him.
The last of it he ran out into the shallows at the head of a cut where the current came around and would take anything laid in it, and there he stopped, because that is where a trail stops. Water does not hold a story. That is the whole reason a man goes into it.
Then he stood in the dark a while and went back over what he had made from the other end, the way he would have come at it as a stranger, and it read. It read like a man who had gone off with something and had known enough to get to water and not enough to do it well.
He came up out of the bottom onto the parish road well east of the slough and rode north until he struck the ridge road above the town, and then he turned around on it and came down into Mourning Bend from the north, a little after ten in the morning, at a walk, in a clean shirt, with the dust of the ridge road on him and nothing else.
The town had already turned itself over. There were men on the street who had no business on the street on a Thursday and they were standing in the wrong places, in twos and threes out in the middle of it where a man stands when he is waiting on news instead of going about. Two horses were tied at Odalie's that Silas did not know. A wagon had been backed up to the wash-kitchen and was sitting there empty with the mule still in the traces and nobody with it.
Silas took the horse up to the courthouse rail and got down and tied him and stood a moment with his hand on the animal's neck, and then he went in.
Dupree was back. He filled the doorway of the office and he had come off the boat and gone straight to it, because he still had his coat on in that heat and there was a valise on the floor by the desk that nobody had moved. Heavy through the chest and the belly both, gray in the beard, and a face that had spent thirty years learning to give nothing away and had gotten most of the distance.
Shaw was at the desk with the pen in his hand. He did not look up when Silas came in, and then he did, and there was nothing in it but tiredness.
"Crane," Dupree said.
"Sheriff."
"Where's my prisoner."
"Gone," Silas said.
"Gone," Dupree said.
"I went out to him before light and the door was standing and the hasp was driven out of it and he was not in there." Silas had his hat in his hand. "There was sign going off south behind the wash-kitchen and it was fresh and I took it up. I had it about two miles and then the ground went to water and I lost it, and I cast both banks an hour and a half and never cut it again, and I come back in."
"That's it."
"That's what I've got."
Dupree looked at him and Silas let him look. He had learned in the war what to do with his face when a man was taking his time with it, which is nothing.
"You had sign for two miles," Dupree said. "What was in it."
"One man. One set going, deep at the toe and short in the stride, and he was carrying something out in front of him that was not light and that he was not used to carrying."
"A woman."
"I couldn't tell you what. Weight and no second set of feet is what I had." He stopped there a moment. "There's nothing in that ground that walked out on its own but him."
Dupree looked at Shaw. Shaw did not look up.
"You didn't rouse the house."
"No."
"Why not."
"Trail like that goes off with the dew," Silas said. "I'd rather have had him and told it after than told it first and lost him."
"Uh-huh."
"It's the truth of my thinking."
"You had the key," Dupree said.
"Odalie had the key."
"You had the man."
"I had the man," Silas agreed. "And I had him tied to that post with my own rope and I've tied a good many and none of them ever come loose on me. Somebody had one too, or he had help, and I don't make out a third answer. The hasp is forced. You'll see it. It's driven out from the inside and the screws are pulled through the wood and you can look at it standing up."
"Shaw's been in that room since seven," Dupree said.
"Then he's seen it."
"He's seen a good deal." Dupree took his coat off finally and hung it on the nail and did not seem any cooler for it. "You want to hear what he's seen, or you going to keep telling me about a door."
"Blood," Dupree said. "On that floor from the post to the threshold and out of it, and a chair down, and a crock broke, and no woman anywhere in that house. Celestine Prejean has not been seen since sometime last night and neither has the child." He let that stand. "So there it is. He got out and he did for her and he took the girl with him, and you were two miles behind him in the dark and never knew what you was tracking."
"I didn't go in the room," Silas said.
"You didn't go in the room."
"Door was standing and he wasn't in it and I could see that much from the yard, and the sign was going off south and getting older every minute I stood there." He turned the hat once in his hands and stopped. "If I'd gone in and looked at it I'd have lost him for certain. As it went I lost him anyhow."
Shaw spoke up from the desk without lifting his head. "Handprint on the doorframe," he said. "High up on the outside. Little one. She went out that door on her feet."
Dupree said nothing to that. Neither did Silas.
"There's people saying he had the whole of it worked out beforehand," Shaw said. "Had somebody outside. Been in that country long enough to know where the water is."
"He'd been in it since spring," Silas said.
That was the last thing he offered and it was true, and he watched it go into the room and settle where the rest of it had settled.
Through the open window and down the slope, a woman was calling.
She had been at it since before he rode in and he had heard her coming up the street and had not let himself sort it out from the rest of the noise. It was Odalie. She was out in the yard behind her own house calling toward the slough and the low ground beyond it, over and over, in a voice that had been going a long time and had worn through in the middle, so that the name came out in two pieces now. Ruthie. Ruthie.
Nobody in the office said anything for a bit.
"Sixty dollars," Dupree said, "is federal, and it is payable on a live delivery, and there ain't a live delivery."
"And whose doing is that," Silas said.
Dupree's chin came up a little.
"I walked that man out of the Saint Barrow bottoms on a rope and I brought him to this office at dark, alive, on his feet, and I stood on that floor right there and your deputy told me the cell was full." He had the hat in one hand and he did not turn it. "So he went to a brothel. That was your office's doing and not mine. I asked where and I was told where and I done what I was told."
Shaw's pen had stopped.
"You was to watch him."
"I was forty foot off with my boots on, and I'd have been outside a cell block door if there'd been one to sit at." Silas's voice had not come up much and it had gone flat in a way that carried further. "Put it plain, Sheriff. What is it you think I got out of this. I go four days in that country and a night in the water for sixty dollars, and then the night before I collect it I turn him loose and walk off from the money. Is that the shape of it. I'd like to hear a man say that out loud and see can he keep his face straight while he does it."
Nobody said anything.
"This morning I'd have come in here and got paid and rode home," Silas said. "That's the whole of what I wanted out of Mourning Bend. Instead I've got nothing, and there's a woman down that hill hollering, and you're stood there working out how to make it mine."
"I'm working out what happened."
"Then work it out. You've got a forced door and a full cell and a man you never put behind iron."
Dupree let that sit longer than Silas expected him to.
"You'll not leave the parish."
"I'll be at the Blackwood. I ain't hard to find and I've never been hard to find."
"There'll be a paper wanted out of you. Written and signed."
"When you want it."
Dupree nodded slowly and picked up the valise and set it on the desk, and that was the end of it. Silas put his hat on and went out.
On the courthouse steps he stopped, because the calling came up the slope at him all at once with nothing between it and him.
Men were going down that way with poles and a dog. Somebody had got a skiff off the landing and was working the near bank of the slough with a hook on a line, standing up in her, poling and hooking and poling again, and the water was coming up brown behind him and going back down flat. Down at the corner of the store two men were laying it out to a third, and Silas caught a piece of it as he came past, had it planned, had somebody waiting, had that country by heart, and the third man was nodding along before either of them finished.
He stood on the step and watched the man work that bank for about a minute and a half. Then he went down and untied the horse and got up.
Inside his coat, riding against his ribs where his mother's knife rode, the carved willow figure had gone warm as anything else that spends a morning against a man.
He turned north and rode out of Mourning Bend at a walk, past the store and the gin and the last of the houses, and behind him a woman went on calling a name into the low ground.
— VI —
He did not look back at the town and he did not look at the river.
Beyond Mourning Bend, the road climbed away from the river through fields gone dusty at the edges, then narrowed between pine and scrub oak. Cicadas worked the trees. Heat bent the fence lines and made the far timber waver. The horse kept a steady pace with its head low and the reins loose against its neck.
The willow girl had settled beside Silas's mother's knife, wood against bone, and every stride pressed the two together. He could move it to another pocket. He could throw it into the ditch and let a wagon wheel grind it down. Twice he put a hand inside his coat. Both times he left the carving where it was.
A mile beyond town it was not the road.
Baskin was alive at the post with his head forced back and his eyes stripped open, and the burlap was going in, and going in further, and there was the sound he made around it.
Then it was the road again, and the horse's ears had turned back toward him. Silas had drawn the reins tight without knowing it. He loosened them and kept riding.
His hands had not settled before it went again.
Her fingers were on the cedar doorframe and the nails were opening against it. Rope going tight. The boards coming past underneath her. Her face turning toward the ladder.
Then the road, and the reins wound around both fists. He worked them loose one finger at a time. The horse moved on uneasily, sweat dark beneath the mane.
He put his hand against the carving through the coat and it was not the road.
Pale willow was turning in a wet hand and the knife was going in beneath the little chin and coming around, and a thumb came down and pressed the blood into the groove.
Then it was the road again, and the horse was standing still beneath him and he did not know how long it had been standing. No house showed nearby, and no wagon approached. Wind moved weakly through dry needles. Insects ticked in the grass.
He took out the willow girl and held it in full sun. The carving looked rougher than it had beneath the tallow lamp. One leg was shorter. Three quick cuts made the skirt. A pale shaving remained trapped beneath one arm, and blood sat dark in the groove around the neck. On the back was the press of a thumb. Silas set his own thumb over it. The marks covered each other.
Then it was not the road, and it was not the road for longer this time.
The child was at the loft opening with both hands clamped over her mouth and she was not making any sound at all, and below her, coming up into the light where she could see them, were his hands, black-red to the wrists.
The horse shied hard and took it away from him. Its front hoof struck the ditch, slid, and found ground again. The reins burned across Silas's palm. He caught the saddle horn, hauled the horse back onto the road, and sat breathing while it danced beneath him.
The carving remained clenched in his fist. When he opened his hand, the little wooden face looked no different.
Mourning Bend had disappeared behind the low hills. No one followed. The road lay empty in both directions.
Silas put the carving back inside his coat. His fingers missed the pocket once before finding it.
He gathered the reins and started north again. The horse resisted for several steps, then settled into its pace. Beyond the next rise, the road bent toward the Blackwood. The Crane Place showed at the tree line: fields, cabins, creek, and pine shadow. Smoke from the kitchen chimney lifted above the live oaks. Silas rode toward it with the willow girl against his ribs and the child's face before him.
— End of Chapter I —