Child of God(17)

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without a sound. Ballard cradled the rifle in his arm and made his way down the slope toward the house. He crouched behind the barn listening for sound of Greer. There in the frozen mire of mud and dung deeply plugged with hoof prints. When he came through the barn it was empty. The loft was filled with hay. Ballard stood in the forebay door looking down through the falling snow at the gray shape of the house. He crossed to the chicken house and undid the wire that held the hasp and entered. A few white hens eyed him nervously from their cubby nests on the far wall. Ballard passed along a row of roosting rails and went through a chicken wire door to the feed room. There he loaded his pockets with shelled corn and came back. He surveyed the hens, clucked his tongue at them and reached for one. It erupted from the box with a long squawk and flapped past and lit in the floor and trotted off. Ballard cursed. In the uproar the other hens were following by ones and pairs. He lunged and grabbed one by the tail as it came soaring out. It set up an outraged shrieking until Ballard could get it by the neck. Holding the struggling bird in both hands and with his rifle between his knees he crow hopped to the small dust webbed window and peered out. Nothing stirred. You son of a bitch, said Ballard, to the chicken or Greer or both. He wrung the hen's neck and went quickly through the nesting boxes gathering up the few eggs and putting them in his pockets and then he went out again. IN THE SPRING OR WARMER weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself. Ballard went through the woods kicking down his old trails where they veered over the hill toward his onetime homeplace. Old comings and goings. The tracks of a fox raised out of the snow intaglio like little mushrooms and berry stains where birds shat crimson mutes upon the snow like blood. When he reached the overlook he stood his rifle against the stones and watched the house below him. There was no smoke coming from the chimney. Ballard watched with his arms folded. He asked Greer where he was today. A gray and colder day with all the melting snow ceased from its dripping and runneling. Ballard watched the first flakes fall like ash into the valley. Where are you, you bastard? he called. Two minute doilies of snow settled and perished on the crossed arms of his coat. He watched until the silent house grew dim below him in the gray snowfall. After a while he took up the rifle once again and crossed the ridge to where he could see the road. There was nobody going up or down. Already the snow was falling so that you could not see up the valley at all. A spray of small birds came out of the snowfall and passed like windblown leaves into the silence again. Ballard ,crouched on his heels with the rifle between his knees. He told the snow to fall faster and it did. AFTER THE SNOW CEASED HE went every day. He'd watch from his half mile promontory, see Greer come from the house for wood or go to the barn or to the chicken house. After he'd gone in again Ballard would wander about aimlessly in the wood talking to himself. He laid queer plans. His shuffling boot tracks trampling out the prints of lesser life. Where mice had gone, or foxes hunting in the night; The dove like imprimatur of a stooping owl. He'd long been wearing the underclothes of his female victims but now he took to appearing in their outer wear as well. A gothic

doll in ill fit clothes, it's carmine mouth floating detached and bright in the white landscape. Down there the valley with the few rust stained roofs and faintest wisps of smoke. The ribboned slash of mud that the road made up the white valley and beyond it the fold on fold of mountains with their black weirs of winter tree limbs and dull green cedars. His own tracks came from the cave blood red with cave mud and paled across the slope as if the snow had cauterised his feet until he left dry white prints in the snow. False spring came again with a warm wind. The snow melted off into little patches of gray ice among the wet leaves. With the advent of this weather bats began to stir from somewhere deep in the cave. Ballard lying on his pallet by the fire one evening saw them come from the dark of the tunnel and ascend through the hole overhead fluttering wildly in the ash and smoke like souls rising from Hades. When they were gone he watched the hordes of cold stars sprawled across the smoke hole and wondered what stuff they were made of, or himself. YONDER IT IS, SHERIFF, SAID the sheriff's deputy. All right. Go on to the top and turn around. They drove on up the deeply mired road fishtailing slightly and unreeling long slabs of wet mud from under the tires until they came to the loop at the end of the road. Coming back down you could see the ruts where they went off into the weeds and you could see where the young trees were crushed and where the tire tracks went on down the side of the mountain. Yonder she lays, said the deputy. The car was turned on its side in a deep ravine some hundred feet below them. The sheriff wasn't looking at it. He was looking back up the road toward the turnaround. I wisht we'd of been here three days ago when they was still some snow on the ground, he said. Let's go down and look at it. They stood on the side of the car and raised the door up and the deputy descended into the interior. After a while he said: They ain't a damn thing in here, Sheriff. What about in the glove box? Not a thing. Look up in under the seats. I done looked. Look some more. When he came up out of the car he had a bottle cap in his hand. He handed it to the sheriff. What's that? said the sheriff. That's it. The sheriff looked at the bottle cap. Let's get the turtledeck open, he said. In the trunk was a spare tire and a jack and a lugwrench and some rags and two empty bottles. The sheriff was standing with his hands in his pockets looking back up the side of the ravine toward the road. If you wanted to get from here to the road, he said which you would if you was here-how would you go? The deputy pointed. I'd go right up that there gully, he said. So would I, said the sheriff. Where do you reckon he went? I don't know. How long did you say his old lady says he's been gone? Since Sunday evenin. They sure the girl was with him?