Outer Dark(60)

He’s all raised out. He cain’t raise no more.

You don’t need him.

Water in the summer and fire in the winter is all the need I need. We ain’t talkin about what I need. He spat across the child’s head into the fire and a thin chain of sparks ascended in the graygreen smoke. That ain’t what’s concerned.

No.

You ain’t no different from the rest. From any man borned and raised and have his own and die. They ain’t one man in three got even a black suit to die in.

Holme stood with his feet together and his hands at his sides like one arraigned.

What’s his name? the man said.

I don’t know.

He ain’t got nary’n.

No. I don’t reckon. I don’t know.

They say people in hell ain’t got names. But they had to be called somethin to get sent there. Didn’t they.

That tinker might of named him.

It wasn’t his to name. Besides names dies with the namers. A dead man’s dog ain’t got a name. He reached and drew from his boot a slender knife.

Holme seemed to be speaking to something in the night beyond them all. My sister would take him, he said. That chap. We could find her and she’d take him.

Yes, the man said.

I been huntin her.

Harmon was watching the man. Even the mute one stirred. The man took hold of the child and lifted it up. It was watching the fire. Holme saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat’s eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child’s throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly. The mute one knelt forward. He was drooling and making little whimpering noises in his throat. He knelt with his hands outstretched and his nostrils rimpled delicately. The man handed him the child and he seized it up, looked once at Holme with witless eyes, and buried his moaning face in its throat.





LATE IN THE AFTERNOON she entered the glade, coming down a footpath where narrow cart tracks had crushed the weeds and through the wood, half wild and haggard in her shapeless sundrained cerements, yet delicate as any fallow doe, and so into the clearing to stand cradled in a grail of jade and windy light, slender and trembling and pale with wandlike hands to speak the boneless shapes attending her.

And stepping softly with her air of blooded ruin about the glade in a frail agony of grace she trailed her rags through dust and ashes, circling the dead fire, the charred billets and chalk bones, the little calcined ribcage. She poked among the burnt remains of the tinker’s traps, the blackened pans confused among the rubble, the lantern with its skewed glass, the axle and iron wheelhoops already rusting. She went among this charnel curiously. She did not know what to make of it. She waited, but no one returned.

She waited all through the blue twilight and into the dark. Bats came and went. Wind stirred the ashes and the tinker in his tree turned slowly but no one returned. Shadows grew cold across the wood and night rang down upon these lonely figures and after a while little sister was sleeping.


The tinker in his burial tree was a wonder to the birds. The vultures that came by day to nose with their hooked beaks among his buttons and pockets like outrageous pets soon left him naked of his rags and flesh alike. Black mandrake sprang beneath the tree as it will where the seed of the hanged falls and in spring a new branch pierced his breast and flowered in a green boutonniere perennial beneath his yellow grin. He took the sparse winter snows upon what thatch of hair still clung to his dried skull and hunters that passed that way never chanced to see him brooding among his barren limbs. Until wind had tolled the tinker’s bones and seasons loosed them one by one to the ground below and alone his bleached and weathered brisket hung in that lonesome wood like a bone birdcage.





IN LATER YEARS he used to meet a blind man, ragged and serene, who spoke him a good day out of his constant dark. He overtook him tapping through the bright noon dust with his cane, his head erect in that air of wonder the blind wear. Holme would go by but now the blind man has stopped him with his greeting.

How you, said Holme.

Well as ever, said the blind man. Have ye a smoke?

No sir. I ain’t.

Nary a-tall?

I don’t have the habit.

Aye, said the blind man. He unbuttoned the bib of his overalls and brought forth tobacco. Well, he said, it’s good to see the sun again ain’t it.

Holme looked at the cups of blue phlegm which regarded him. It is, he said.

Aye. After so long a time. He trickled tobacco into the slender trough of paper his fingers held and put away the pouch.

It is a right pretty day, Holme said.

The blind man smiled. I know ye, he said. I’ve spoke afore with ye.