You can stay in the barn if ye ain’t proud, the man said. You goin to be on it all day you might as well get under it at night.
All right, Holme said. I thank ye.
I don’t want no smokin in there.
I ain’t never took it up, Holme said.
From the roof ridge he could see a good distance over the rolling country. He adjusted his ladders and sat for a moment, watching the sun bleed across the east, watching a small goat go along the road. The rusted weathercock cried soft above him in the morning wind. He kneaded the bristles of his brush and adjusted his bucket. His shadow moiled cant and baneful over the lot below him and over the waking land a chorale of screaming cocks waned and ceased and began again. When the sun struck the eastern bank of the roof the water drew steaming up the tin and vanished almost instantly. He stirred the thick green paste and began.
By midmorning the roof had reached such a temperature that the wet paint flashed on the tin like lacquer. The paint in the bucket healed over when he rested, and the base of the brush had taken on a skirt of dull green scum. He continued along, marking his progress by the crimped panels. Through the haze of heat rising from the roof he watched a girl come and go from the house with washing, watched her move along the line in the yard, stooping at her basket and reaching up, and the shape of her breasts pulling against the cloth. Paint seeped from the uplifted handle down his poised wrist. He scraped it away with one finger and slapped the paint out of the butt of the brush. He watched her go in again.
By afternoon of the third day he had done one half of the roof and had moved his ladder to the other side, the ladder hanging from the ridge by its cleats, the bucket balanced in the rungs and him painting his way down the first panel. If they had come the day before or even that morning he would not have seen them. They were four, already in the barnlot and coming down the fence high-footed in the green bog of manure and mud. One had a shotgun and the others carried slats, their faces upturned brightly, watching him. He set the brush down, wedging it under a rung, and started up the ladder toward the top, coming erect on the peak and walking it carefully, watching his boots, until he was above the ground ladder. He squatted on his heels and coasted to it, braking with his hands and the soles of his boots and then almost overriding it. He heard one of them yell. He looked down again to see them but they had come under the lee of the barn.
Head him, one of them called.
Other side, Will, other side.
Run him around thisaway and I’ll break him down like a shotgun.
He came down the ladder frontways, half running, falling the last six feet and stumbling up again, running along the side of the barn. At the corner a man sprang up, a face pale and contorted in a whitelipped smile, and brought the slat flatwise across his back with a sound that exploded clear through him. He went headlong in the dried chaff, not even stopping, running again from the ground up and across the fence through the hoglot where a boar came up out of a wallow with a scream and charged him and across the far fence and into the upper pasture. He could hear the man behind him saying Goddamn, Goddamn, leaping and stepping as the boar came at him, trying to get back to the fence and saying You son of a bitch you, and the boar screaming and cutting at him and him sliding and dancing in the mud and above it all the whack of the slat on the boar’s hide.
He went on, through waisthigh grass, listening for the shot until his head hummed. It didn’t come. When he topped out on the hill he turned to look back. They were deployed across the field a hundred yards below him. They stopped, one and the next and the third and the last as if wired together and the one with the shotgun raised it and a black flower bloomed about him. Holme wheeled. The pellets went up his back like wasps. He winced and put one hand to his neck and came away with a thin smear of blood and already he was running again. He came down out of the field running and into a pine wood at the bottom running hard on the open ground with the trees dodging past. When he fell he slid his length again headlong in the pineneedles, rising out of a dark trough with swatches of them stuck to the paint and blood on his palms. When he looked back he had seized his wild face in both hands as if main strength were needed to look there and when he went on he went at a crazed pace deeper into the woods.
He came out upon a ravine and ran along it until it began to draw away to the right and then he plunged and slid down the embankment and leaped to clear the creek at the bottom. But the soft turf gave beneath his foot and he went face down in the water. When he tried to rise he could not. He got himself propped on his elbows, gasping, listening. The creek murmured away down the dark ravine. He leaned his face into the shallow water and drank, choking, and after a while he vomited. And after a while he drank again.