William Gay - The Long Home

An owl on the wing shuttled across the moon and after a while he heard it or its brother calling from out of the fabled dark of Mormon Springs. Where dwelt the ghosts of murdered Mormons and their convert wives and some of the men who had come down this hillside so long ago, the slayers slain. He wondered had the face of the country changed, perhaps they passed this upheaval of the earth. Had folks learned from history, from the shifting of the seasons?

She is not coming, he was thinking. At length he rose. It had turned colder and time seemed to be slowing, to be gearing down for the long haul to dawn. He put the jacket on and buttoned it and picked his way through the stark and silver woods. He crossed the stream at its narrowest point and ascended through ironwood and willow until he came out in the field. In the fierce moonlight the field was profoundly still and his squat shadow the only thing in motion, a stygian and perverse version of himself that ran ahead distorting and miming his movements.

He angled around the hill until he could see the house. He sat on a stone hugging himself against the chill and watched like a thief awaiting an opportunity to steal. After an hour or so a bitter core of anger rose in him and he got up to go but then a figure came out of the house and moved almost instantly into the shadows the woods threw and he could barely watch it progress toward the spring.

Winer changed course and moved as silently as he could into the thickening brush. Anticipation intense as prayer seized him. Tree to tree stealthily to the edge of the embankment and after a moment he heard a voice that appeared to be in conversation with itself. A stone rolled beneath his feet and splashed into the water and he was looking down at a soldier urinating into the stream. The soldier looked up blearyeyed toward the source of this disturbance and leapt backward fumbling with his clothing. Moonlight winked off his upturned glasses and he looked pale and frightened as if some younger variation of the grim reaper had been visited upon him or a revenant from some old violence played here long ago.

When Winer did not vanish or leap upon him the soldier steadied himself and staggered back down to the stream. He adjusted his campaign cap. “What outfit you from?” he called to Winer. Winer spat into the listing stream and made no reply save departure.

She came at midmorning and spoke to him but he was cool and distant and disinclined to conversation. “Be mad then,” she told him. She left but he hardly missed her. Winer’s head hurt from lack of sleep and his arms and legs felt heavy and sluggish and were loath to do his bidding.

He made it through the long morning and when he broke for lunch she came back. He hadn’t brought any lunch but he had a jar of coffee and he was drinking that when she stepped up onto the subflooring.

“I can’t stay but a minute and if you’re goin to fight I’ll just go back in.”

“I never sent for you.”

“You sent for me last night, whether you know it or not”

“Yeah. For what good it did.”

“I wasn’t goin to tell you this but the reason I couldn’t come was he made me set with a man.”

“Who did?”

“Hardin. Dallas.”

“He made you, did he. He hold a gun to you?”

“No.”

“I don’t guess he had to.”

“Just shut up. You don’t know anything about anything.”

“I know I sat up all night in the mouth of that holler like a fool holding the sack on a snipehunt. That’s all I know.”

“Well. I couldn’t help it.”

“Sure, you couldn’t. I bet you couldn’t help telling every soldier in there about it too. Well, you better enjoy it because it’s the last laugh you’ll get out on me.”

“Nathan, I really wanted to. I swear to God I did. His eyes were on me every minute.”

“How come he made you sit with a man? Who was it anyway?”

“I don’t know who he was. Some fat farmer. He’d just come back from sellin his cows or somethin. He was waving his money around and Dallas made me set with him till his money was all gone. I thought he never was goin to pass out.”

“How’d he make you?”

“I don’t know. He just told me I had to.”

“What would he do if you didn’t?”

“I don’t know.” She fell silent.

When she had been a little girl she had tried to think of Hardin as her father. A father was strong and Hardin looked as remorseless and implacable as an Old Testament God, there was no give to him. The man whose blood she’d sprung from was flimsy as a paperdoll father you’d cut from a catalog, a father who when the light was behind him looked curiously transparent. No light shone through Hardin and in a moment of insight she thought he had a similar core of stubbornness in Winer. Somehow you knew without showing him that there was no give to him either.

“You don’t know. How could you not know?”

She was quiet for a time. She remembered the way Hardin had been looking at her for the last year or so, as though he were deciding what to do with her.

“Do you always do what people order you to? What if I’d ordered you to meet me? What would you have done then?”

“Don’t go so fast,” she said. She gave him just a trace of a smile and shrugged. “You’re not quite Dallas Hardin,” she said.

“Have you ever wondered what he’d do?”

Whatever it took, she thought, thinking Hardin was bottomless.

“All this is easy for you to say,” she told him. “You put up your tools every night and go home. I’m already at home. There’s nowhere else for me to go. You don’t know him.”

“I believe I know him about as well as I need to.”

He’d been looking into her eyes and for just an instant something flickered there that was older than he, older than anybody, some knowledge that couldn’t be measured in years.

“You know him better,” she said.

“I know him well enough to know he’s not paying me to shoot the breeze with you. I’ve got to get to work. This has been a long day anyhow.”

“I might could get out on a Sunday. There’s nobody much around here then and Dallas don’t pay me much mind.”

“I’m once a fool,” Winer said. “Twice don’t interest me.”

“I’ll meet you anywhere you say.”

She was studying him and something in her face seemed to alter slightly even as she watched him, somehow giving him the feeling that she had divined some quality in him that he wasn’t even aware of.

He tried to think. His mind was murky and slow, it seemed to be grinding toward an ultimate halt. “All right,” he finally said. “The only place I can think of where nobody can find us is where Weiss used to live. Meet me there Sunday evening.”

Paying his debt to Motormouth, Winer had invited him to stay until he found a permanent residence but Motormouth seemed to have passed beyond the need for shelter and he stayed only three days. He found the walls too confining, the house too stationary to suit him. He was too acclimated to the motion of wheels, the random and accessible distances of the riverbank, the precarious existence that shuttled him from Hardin’s to the river, from de Vries’s cabstand to the highway. Some creature of the night halfdomesticated reverting back to wildness, staying out for longer and longer periods then just not coming back at all.

Then Winer was alone. He put up the winter’s wood and stacked the porch with it. On these first cool evenings he’d build himself a fire and sat before it. He quit worrying and wondering about the future and decided to just let it roll. By lamplight he’d read before the flickering fire and he found the silence not hard to take. He was working hard now trying to beat winter. In bed he would sometimes lie in a halfstupor of weariness before sleep came but he felt that somehow a fair exchange had been made, someone paid him money to endure this exhaustion. I am a carpenter, he thought. He was something, somebody, there was a name he could affix to himself. And there was a routine and an order to these days that endeared them to him, they were long, slow days he would remember in time to come when order and symmetry were things more dreamt than experienced. I am paying my way, he thought, carrying my own weight, and on these last fall days he found something that had always eluded him, a cold solitary peace.