Outer Dark(50)

HOLME WALKED across the stony earth with his eyes on his broken boots, crossing a black and fallow bottom newly turned, the wind coming very steady and cold and with it like pieces of scaled slate martins with shrill chittering cast up motionless to break and wheel low along the ground past him once again. When he reached the fence he stopped for a moment to look back at the road and then he went on, crossing into a field of rank weeds that heeled with harsh dip and clash under the wind as if fled through by something unseen.

He stood before the cabin uncertainly, his palms resting in the small of his back. He looked toward the road again. Then he mounted the steps to the porch and crossed and entered through the open door.

It was a very old cabin and the ceiling of the room he stood in was little higher than his head, the unhewn beams smoked a foggy and depthless black and trellised with cobwebbing of the same color. The floor was buckled and the walls seemed tottering and he could see nothing plane or plumb anywhere. There was a small window mortised crookedly into the logs of one wall, the sash hung with leather hinges. That and the long clayless chinks among the logs let in the waning light of this day and wind crossed the room with the steady cool pull of running water. There was a claymortared fireplace of flatless and illfitted fieldstone which bulged outward in the room with incipient collapse, a wagon spring for lintel, the hearth of poured mud hard and polished as stone. A serpentine poker. Two wooden bedsteads with tickings of husks and a halfbed with a mattress on which lay curled a dead cat leering with eyeless grimace, a caved and maggoty shape that gave off a faint dry putrescence above the reek of aged smoke. He took hold of the mattress and pulled it from the bed and dragged it to the door, fighting it through the narrow opening and outside and long bright red beetles coming constantly from beneath the cat to scatter in radial symmetry outward and drop audibly to the floor. He threw the mattress in the yard and went back in. In the kitchen a doorless woodstove propped in the front with two bricks against the floor’s fierce incline. A partitioned mealbin with sifter and a hard dry crust of meal adhering to the wood, the meal impregnated with worms whose shed husks littered the floor of the bin among micedroppings and dead beetles. A solid butternut safe in which languished some pieces of cheap white crockery, chipped and handleshorn coffeecups, plates serrated about their perimeters as though bitten in maniacal hunger, a tin percolator in which an inverted salmoncan sat for a lid. A nameless gray dust lay over everything. He returned to the front room and at the bed pressed one spread palm down in the center of the ticking and looked about him wearily.

Later he went out and gathered wood. He found beanpoles in a log crib behind the house and brought them in and he found some roughsawn chestnut boards. When he had got the fire going he pulled one of the beds up toward the hearth and sat down and watched the flames. Smoke seeped from under the wagon spring and stood in blue tiers and he could hear swifts in the flue fluttering like wind in a bottle. He sat on the bed with his hands dangling between his knees. The window light had crept from the floor onto the far wall and the room lay traversed with a bar of bronze and hovering dust. After a while he rose again and went out for more wood.

When he came back he built up the fire and pulled off the stinking boots and stretched out on the bed. There was a string of dried peppers hanging from a nail in the beam over the fireplace. They looked like leather. In the chimney’s throat frail curds of old soot quivered with the heat. A deermouse came down from somewhere in the logs, soundless as a feather falling, paused with one foot tucked to his white bib and regarded him with huge black eyes. He watched it. He blinked and it was gone. He slept.

He was cold all night and in the morning when he woke there was a frost. There was also a man watching him with one bright china eye from behind the paired bores of a shotgun.

Get up, he said.

Holme sat slowly.

Now get your boots. He motioned sideways with his head to where they lay in the floor.

He bent to reach for the boots and got one up, fumbling at it with his naked foot.

Hold it, the man said, waving the barrels in an arc before his face.

He stopped, holding the boot up, watching the man.

Just tote em with ye.

He got the other boot and sat there in the bed holding them in his lap.

Now let’s go, the man said, stepping back and motioning toward the door with the shotgun.

He rose and crossed the floor and stepped out. The long flat grass about the house was blanched with frost, the barren landscape beyond sprayed with those small and anonymous birds of winter. He had not thought of such cold weather and was surprised to see it come.