T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

“Yes, I’d like some refreshment, if you please. And I’ll need a guide to take me as far as the Billingses’ to meet up with the Post.”

“The Billingses? At this hour of night?”

The hostess had raised her voice so that every soul in the place could appreciate the clear and irrefragable reason of what she was saying, and she went on to point out that it was twelve miles in the dark and that there would be none there to take her, but that her son John, if the payment was requisite to his risking life and limb, might be induced to go. Even at this unholy hour.

And where was John?

“You never mind. Just state your price.”

Madam Knight sat as still as if she were in her own parlor with her mother and daughter and Mrs. Trowbridge and her two boarders gathered round her. She was thirty-eight years old, with a face that had once been pretty, and though she was plump and her hands were soft, she was used to work and to hard-dealing and she was no barmaid in a country tavern. She gazed calmly on the hostess and said nothing.

“Two pieces of eight,” the woman said. “And a dram.”

A moment passed, every ear in the place attuned to the sequel. “I will not be accessory to such extortion,” Sarah pronounced in an even voice, “not if I have to find my own way, alone and defenseless in the dark.”

The hostess went on like a singing Quaker, mounting excuse atop argument, and the men stopped chewing and held the pewter mugs arrested in their hands, until finally an old long-nosed cadaver who looked to be twice the hostess’s age rose up from the near table and asked how much she would pay him to show her the way.

Sarah was nonplussed. “Who are you?”

“John,” he said, and jerked a finger toward the hostess. “’Er son.”

Dedham to the Billingses’

If the road had been dark before, now it was as if she were blind and afflicted and the horse blind too. Clouds had rolled in to pull a shade over the stars and planets while she’d sat listening to the hostess at the tavern, and if it weren’t for the sense of hearing and the feel of a damp breeze on her face, she might as well have been locked in a closet somewhere. John was just there ahead of her, as Cousin Robert had been earlier, but John was a talker and the strings of his sentences pulled her forward like a spare set of reins. Like his mother, he was a monologuist. His subject was himself and the myriad dangers of the road — savage Indians, catamounts, bears, wolves and common thieves — he’d managed to overthrow by his own cunning and heroism in the weeks and months just recently passed. “There was a man ’ere, on this very spot, murdered and drawn into four pieces by a Pequot with two brass rings in ’is ears,” he told her. “Rum was the cause of it. If I’d passed by an hour before it would have been me.” And: “The catamount’s a wicked thing. Gets a horse by the nostrils and then rakes out the innards with ’is hinder claws. I’ve seen it myself.” And again: “Then you’ve got your shades of the murdered. When the wind is down you hear them hollowin’ at every crossroads.”

She wasn’t impressed. They’d hanged women for witches in her time, and every corner, even in town, seemed to be the haunt of one goblin or another. Stories and wives’ tales, legends to titillate the children before bed. There were real dangers in the world, dangers here in the dark, but they were overhead and underfoot, the nagging branch and open gully, the horse misstepping and coming down hard on her, the invisible limb to brain her as she levitated by, but she tried not to think of them, tried to trust in her guide — John the living cadaver — and the horse beneath her. She gripped the saddle and tried to ease the ache in her seat, which had radiated out to her limbs now and her backbone, even her neck, and she let her mind go numb with the night and the sweet released odors of the leaves they crushed underfoot.

At the Billingses’

She would never have known the house was there but for the sudden scent of wood smoke and the narrowest ribbon of light that hung in the void like the spare edge of something grander. “If you’ll just alight, then, Missus,” John was saying, and she could feel his hand at her elbow to help her down, “and take yourself right on through that door there.”

“What door?”

“There. Right before your face.”

He led her forward even as the horses stamped in their impatience to be rid of the saddle. She felt stone beneath her feet and focused on the ribbon of light till the door fell inward and she was in the room itself, low beams, plank floor, a single lantern and the fire dead in the hearth. In the next instant a young woman of fifteen or so rose up out of the inglenook with a contorted face and demanded to know who she was and what she was doing in her house at such an hour. The girl stood with her legs apart, as if ready to defend herself. Her voice was strained. “I never seen a woman on the road so dreadful late. Who are you? Where are you going? You scared me out of my wits.”

“This is a lodging house, or am I mistaken?” Sarah drew herself up, sorer than she’d ever been in her life, the back of a horse — any horse — like the Devil’s own rack, and all she wanted was a bed, not provender, not company, not even civility — just that: a bed.

“My ma’s asleep,” the girl said, standing her ground. “So’s my pa. And William too.”

“It’s William I’ve come about. He’s the Post, isn’t he?”

“I suspect.”

“Well, I’ll be traveling west with him in the morning and I’ll need a bed for the night. You do have a bed?” Even as she said it she entertained a vision of sleeping rough, stretched out on the cold ground amidst the dried-out husks of the fallen leaves, prey to anything that stalked or crept, and she felt all the strength go out of her. She never pleaded. It wasn’t in her nature. But she was slipping fast when the door suddenly opened behind her and John stepped into the room.

The girl’s eyes ran to him. “Lawful heart, John, is it you?” she cried, and then it was all right, and she offered a chair and a biscuit and darted away upstairs only to appear a moment later with three rings on her fingers and her hair brushed back from her brow. And then the chattering began, one topic flung down as quickly as the next was taken up, and all Sarah wanted was that bed, which finally she found in a little back lean-to that wasn’t much bigger than the bedstead itself. As for comfort, the bed was like a mound of bricks, the shuck mattress even worse. No matter. Exhaustion overcame her. She undressed and slid in under the counterpane even as the bed lice stole out for the feast.

The Billingses’ to Foxvale

She arose stiff in the morning, feeling as if she’d been pounded head to toe with the flat head of a mallet, and the girl was nowhere to be seen. But William was there, scooping porridge out of a bowl by the fire, and the mistress of the house. Sarah made her own introductions, paid for her bed, a mug of coffee that scalded her palate, and her own wooden bowl of porridge, and then she climbed back into the rack of the saddle and they were gone by eight in the morning.

The country they passed through rolled one way and the other, liberally partitioned by streams, creeks, freshets and swamps, the hooves of the horses eternally flinging up ovals of black muck that smelled of things dead and buried. There were birds in the trees still, though the summer flocks were gone, and every branch seemed to hold a squirrel or chipmunk. The leaves were in color, the dragonflies glazed and hovering over the shadows in the road ahead, and in the clearings goldenrod nodding bright on a thousand stalks. For the first time she found herself relaxing, settling into the slow-haunching rhythm of the horse as she followed the Post’s back and the swishing tail of his mount through one glade after another. There were no houses, no people. She heard a gabbling in the forest and saw the dark-clothed shapes there — turkeys, in all their powers and dominions, turkeys enough to feed all of Boston — and she couldn’t help thinking of the basted bird in a pan over the fire.