If he’d lived, she told him one evening, you wouldn’t want for nothin. And him disabled in the war with that platmium plate in his head and all—turned down the govmint disability, he did. Too proud. Wouldn’t take no handout from nobody even if it was the govmint. He was a provider all right, may the Lord God Jesus keep him.
Yes, she said, eying him doubtfully, you make half the man he was an you’ll be goin some.
The fire ticked on in the little stove, cherrying softly the one side of it till the cracks in the old iron showed like thin spiders sprawled there.
Rocking quietly in her chair she had the appearance of one engaged in some grim and persevering endeavor in which hope was the only useful implement. Not even patience. As if perhaps in some indistinct future the chair itself would rise and bear her away to glory with her sitting fiercely sedate and her feet maybe tucked under the rung, her skirt gathered about her. She was humming something in her high nasal hum, faint evocation of summer bees. The coals chuckled, settled with easy sifting sounds. She rocked. That was how winter came that year.
Through the weary slide of the wiper on the glass, the water sluicing away, Sylder watched the rain dance in the lights, flash from the black road. Behind him the siren sounded again, louder and with a new sense of urgency. I never tried it in the rain, he was thinking. The accelerator pedal was crushed hard under his foot and he watched the needle strain upward to sixty before he let off for the next curve. Got to do it afore I start up the mountain, he told himself, or I’m in a sling. So it would have to be at the forks of the road.
Lightning glared in threatful illusions of proximity and quick shapes appeared in the road, leapt from ditch or tree in configurations antic and bizarre. Ghosts of mist rose sadly from the paving and broke in willowy shreds upon the hood, the windshield. One curve more. Behind him the rear window blackened, then the slow inexorable reach of lights crept out and fingered their way across the hillside off to his left, remarking scrub pines, ropes of limestone stretched in a yellow path like rows of somnolent sheep. When he reached the top of the hill the lights dropped away and the siren sounded again.
I can take a wide sweep, he told himself hopefully. The road looked like oil. Then there was no more time and he was there, nerve and muscle on their own and him just watching. He went into it at forty by the speedometer, saw the store blink its square eyes, cut the wheel to the left, one hand locking for just a moment the handbrake.
He couldn’t see any more then. He brought the wheel back, the brake already released. Except he couldn’t pull it sharp enough and the front end was sliding away and not turning. Then it gave and a streaming herd of trees swam past in the lights as if rushing headlong off the very rim of the earth and the store loomed again, glazed onto the green frieze, spinning past starkly white and in incredible elongation. And yet once more, trees and building in one long blur and then he was jarred from the rear by a solid whump of a sound and heard something snap like a dry stick cracking and then a rattling spray of glass. The lights had come to rest straight back down the road and he already had the shiftlever up in second, the tires whining, inching forward, when the cruiser leapt over the hill before him. Then the tires bit and he was gone, raking a fender of the other car on the way out with deliberate skill. Behind him the store squinted with half a post leaning in through one window and a corner of the porch sagging down, abject and humble in the pounding rain.
Sylder popped a match on the dash and lit a cigarette. Adios, John, he said. He sang quietly to himself: Long gone, ain’t he lucky? Long gone, from Kentucky … rocking slightly with the car’s motion as it strung the curves.
It was in August that he had found the sparrowhawk on the mountain road, crouched in the dust with one small falcon wing fanned and limp, eying him without malice or fear—something hard there, implacable and ungiving. It followed his movements as he approached and then turned its head when he reached out his hand to it, picked it up, feeling it warm and palpitant in the palm of his hand, not watching him, not moving, but only looking out over the valley calmly with its cold-glinting accipitral eyes, its hackles riffling in the wind. He carried it home and put it in a box in the loft and fed it meat and grasshoppers for three days and then it died.
Saturday he went into town with Mr Eller, holding the bag in one hand and sitting up high in the cab of the old truck watching the fields go by and then houses and more of them and finally stores and filling stations, the river-bridge, and beyond that the shape of the city against the hot morning sky.
How you gettin back? Mr Eller asked.