The Double Hook Page 9

  He led the horse out of the barn and swung into the saddle.

  Unless a man defaults, he said, a debt is a sort of bond.

  The horse turned of its own accord towards the bridge. James gave it its head. It tossed its mane and held the bit lightly between its teeth. Freed from the stable, it turned its head towards home.

  James felt the muscles moving under him. Then he heard the hollow ring of hooves on the bridge. The bridge lay a black arch over the clear sweep of the river. And in the shadow of the girders fear unwound itself again like the line from his mother’s reel.

  Where is your hope?

  Better go down to the bars of the pit

  Better rest in the dust

  Justice is swifter than water.

  But the horse carried James across the bridge and up a path onto the shoulders of the hills. The dead grass snapped beneath the horse’s feet as it moved, and the dust rose like spray in the moonlight from the sweep of its fetlocks.

  James leaned forward. The horse raced from the ridge through a meadow of wild hay watered by some hidden spring. It slowed to a lope, to a canter, to a pace.

  Hills rose again on the other side of the meadow. James could feel the pull of the horse’s shoulders as it stepped its way up through the rocks and bushes. He could feel the muscles contract and tighten as the horse began its descent on the other side.

  At the bottom they came to a creek. James could hear the horse’s feet parting the water. He could hear the flow of water on stones, but in this skyless slit the water was opaque and formless. He shut his eyes and fastened his free hand in his horse’s mane.

  As they climbed again, the horse seemed to draw life with every breath. It climbed. It rounded ledges. It held close to the rock where nothing but the feel of stone marked the fall below.

  9

  In Felix’s kitchen the girl turned again and groaned. She yelped and sat up.

  When’s your time? Angel asked.

  How would I know, the girl said.

  There’s not much doubt, Angel said. And the house already crowded to the corners.

  She sat back in her chair.

  If you were one of mine she said, and I was no further than your ma is from here I’d want to come no matter what I’d said or done. A woman sharpens herself to endure. Since she can be trod on like an egg, she grows herself to stone.

  She got up and went to the door of the bedroom.

  Felix, she called, get up.

  The terrier growled. Felix did not stir. Angel called again. He turned.

  I’m going for the Widow, she said.

  Felix got out of bed. He still wore his bib overalls.

  I couldn’t do anything but play the fiddle, he said.

  10

  Neither Ara nor the Widow could sleep. They had cleared away the dishes and sat talking.

  Dear God, the Widow said, she may be alone like some animal in the wood.

  James might have planned to meet her, Ara said. He wasn’t there. The day his mother died he had his horse saddled and waiting. But he never in all his life had strength enough to set himself against things.

  The Widow shook her head.

  We can only guess, she said. It’s best not to think.

  11

  It was a knock on the door which disturbed them at last.

  Dear Father, said the Widow, throwing her apron over her head, what shall I say? What must I do?

  Ara opened the door.

  It’s Angel, she said.

  What does she want? the Widow asked. Speak, woman, speak. Do you know where the child is, God forgive her and me. Dear God, she said, I who wouldn’t drive a whelping dog out of the yard have done this.

  Angel did not answer.

  Can you harness the wagon? she asked Ara.

  Then she turned to the Widow.

  We’ve got to get you down to Felix Prosper’s somehow, she said. There’s no use wailing on God.

  No one thought of Felix, Ara said.

  12

  Felix played the fiddle. The children slept on. Kip raised himself on his elbow to listen.

  Light a light, the girl said. I want to see.

  It will be daylight soon, Felix said.

  The girl could hear his arm rubbing against the cloth of his overalls. She could hear the pad of his foot beating out the rhythm.

  What if Angel doesn’t come? she asked.

  She’ll come, Felix said.

  Why did she go? the girl said. What good could it do?

  She put out her hand and grasped Felix’s knee.

  Felix, she said, I want Angel. Felix, she cried, I’m afraid. Will it hate to be born? Will it blame me all the years of its life?

  Go away, she called out. Let me be.

  Felix put down his fiddle. He went to the bedroom door. The light was turning blue at the window. A bird rattled about in the bushes. The hounds rubbed softly at the base of the door.

  The girl’s voice filled the cabin.

  It might be dead, she cried. Nobody wants it. Nobody. It might have a scar like the lash of a whip. Felix, she called, come back. Come back. There’s a flower growing against the wall and it’s reaching out to cover me.

  She’s thinking of Greta, Kip said. What did she and James do? he asked the girl.

  Nothing, she moaned. Nothing. James is coming I tell you. I can hear his horse’s feet snapping the twigs. I can feel the beat of its hooves trembling the ground.

  Then she began to cry again.

  It’s me, she sobbed, outside in the night. Open the door.

  Felix shook the children out of bed. The terrier yelped as he pushed it with his hand.

  Outside, he said. Get going.

  Take something to cover your backsides, Felix bellowed. You can lie with the hounds or in the hay.

  He went back to the kitchen and bent over the girl. Her arms were round his neck. He could feel her shaking and biting at his shoulder. He carried her in to the bed.

  Keep listening, he called to Kip. Keep listening for Angel to come.

  The girl shut her eyes. Her hands twisted the blanket which Felix threw over her. Then she lay still. She looked crumpled and worn as an old pillow.

  Felix thought of Angel. Dark and sinewed as bark. Tough and rooted as thistle. I’ve never heard her cry, he thought. The folds above his eyes contracted. He bent over and took one of the girl’s hands between his thick fingers. It was not until the girl had come battering at his peace that he’d wondered at all about the pain of a growing root.

  The girl cried out again and clutched at his hand.

  He sat on the edge of the bed. The girl lay still.

  If he could only shed his flesh, moult and feather again, he might begin once more.

  His eyelids dropped. His flesh melted. He rose from the bed on soft owl wings. And below he saw his old body crouched down like an ox by the manger.

  He reached for his fiddle. Then he heard at a distance the chatter of wheels on the rutted road.

  13

  James’s horse still brought him on. Night had shrunk into the long shadows of the trees, into the slender shadows of the grass, into the flitting shadow of birds. Light defined the world. It picked out the shattered rock, the bleached and pitted bone.

  It would edge the empty bottle on Felicia’s table, James thought. It would lie congealed in the unwashed plates. It would polish the yellow of Traff’s head and count the streaked tears under Lilly’s eyes.

  It would shine in his own empty mangers. On Kip’s face. On Greta’s bleak reproach. On the loose stones William had piled on his mother’s grave.

  Daylight called on him to look. To say what he had done. Yet he could see, he told himself, only as far as his eyes looked. Only as far as the land lay flat before him. Only up to the earth-tethered clouds. He could, too, he knew, look into his own heart as he could look into the guts of a deer when he slit the white underbelly. He held memory like a knife in his hand. But he clasped it shut and rode on.

  He c
ould not think of what he’d done. He couldn’t think of what he’d do. He would simply come back as he’d gone. He’d stand silent in their cry of hate. Whatever the world said, whatever the girl said, he’d find her. Out of his corruption life had leafed and he’d stepped on it carelessly as a man steps on spring shoots.

  The horse had brought him out on the brow of the hill. Below him he could see the road which ran up the creek past Felix Prosper’s, past Theophil’s, past the Widow Wagner’s, past William’s, round by the flat lake to his own gate. From the height of the hill the land below seemed ordered and regular, but as the horse slipped down over the shale into a clump of pines he wondered where in all the folds and creases he would find the girl. He remembered her words: What do you want me to do now? His silence. Greta’s eyes behind him. Must the whole world suffer because Greta had been wronged? Must the creek dry up forever and the hills be pegged like tanned skin to the rack of their own bones?

  Below in the valley he heard the creak of a wagon-box and the rattle of wheels. He wondered why he’d seen nothing on the road when he’d looked down from above. Theophil must be up and about some business of his own.

  14

  Theophil did not hear the wagon as it passed. He turned and pulled sleep about him like an empty sack.

  15

  It was Ara who drove the horses. Angel was beside her on the seat. The Widow sat on a heap of quilts and a feather bolster in the box. At each jolt of the wagon she called on God.

  Angel looked over her shoulder.

  He’s given you lambswool and goose feathers, she said. What more do you want?

  The Widow groaned.

  Touch them up, Angel said to Ara as she looked at the team. Felix can’t do anything but fiddle. The wonder is he stayed about at all.

  Angel took the whip out of the socket. Ara’s hands tightened on the reins.

  What if they bolt? she said.

  Dear God, the Widow said, shall I be drawn to death by my own son’s team?

  Loose the lines, Angel said to Ara, or they’ll snap. You can’t urge and hold a thing at the same time.

  The horses broke into a trot. They tossed their manes and lifted their feet.

  I never thought I’d be driving a team down this length of road, Ara said. Wherever I go I most often go by my own strength.

  16

  At the other end of the valley William and the boy still waited.

  It seems a strange sort of thing, William said, to light another fire on the top of what fire has destroyed. The curious thing about fire, he said, is you need it and you fear it at once.

  Every time a shoe has to be shaped, or the curve of a bit altered, or a belly filled, someone lights a fire. In winter we cry out for the sun, but half the time it’s too hot, the butter melts, the cream sours, the earth crumbles and rises in dust.

  With a stick he pushed away the embers from the foolhen which the boy had snared in the kinnikinic bushes.

  The boy was sitting silent and restless beside him.

  I did wrong to stop with you, the boy said. A grown man doesn’t need someone to sit up with him no matter what the occasion.

  A man needs living things about him, William said. To remind him he’s not a stone or a stick. That he’s not just a lone bull who can put down his head and paw the bank and charge at anything that takes his fancy.

  He had taken the bird out of the ashes and was dividing the carcass.

  You didn’t stop, though, to stay with me, he said. You stayed because waiting is better than thrashing around. You stayed because if James comes you can settle your mind about what you really don’t know.

  I’ve been thinking, the boy said, that I didn’t ride down past Theophil’s. No one, he said, has asked Felix Prosper. Though what help one could get from Felix I don’t know, he said, since Felix sits there like the round world all centred in on himself.

  He drinks coffee like the rest of us, William said. Though, he said, I’d be hard pressed to know how he comes by the money to pay for it. If you think of it, he said, this case of Felix is a standing lesson for someone to think twice. A man who drinks coffee is dependent on something outside himself. But I myself doubt that he’d be much help to a person in trouble. He has troubles of his own if he cared to pick them up, but he lets them lie on another man’s doorstep. He spends all his days lying round like a dog in a strip of sunlight taking warmth where he finds it.

  I never heard of a dog brewing himself a pot of coffee, the boy said. The thing about a dog lying in the sunlight is it just lies in the sunlight. Perhaps no living man can do just that.

  The two men sat in silence for a while watching the sun rise over the backs of the hills.

  It’s going to be another scorcher, William said, but the boy wasn’t listening to him. He had heard a grouse rise on the hillside and boom down into a gully. Then he saw a horse and rider parting the branches on the lower slope. It was James. As he rode closer, the boy noticed that he was wearing a new plaid shirt.

  William stood up.

  He’s been to town, the boy said. Perhaps he took Lenchen with him.

  17

  As Ara turned the team into the gate, she raised her head. The Widow sat upright on the lambswool quilts, her hands on the edge of the box. Above the chatter of a chipmunk which balanced on a bush near the cabin window, they heard a thin wailing.

  Dear God, said the Widow, it’s a feeble cry. Quick. Quick, she called and clambered down from the box as Ara pulled the horses to a stop before the door.

  We don’t want any trouble, Angel said as she jumped down from the seat.

  The Widow’s hand was on the knob.

  If there’s trouble, Mrs. Prosper, she said, it won’t be of my making. Dear God, she said, the latch needs oil.

  18

  When James pulled his horse up at the foot of the slope he could see the gate, the stable, the path which led down from the stable-yard to the creek. Where the house had been there was nothing but blank smouldering space. On the fringe of the space he saw the figures of William and the boy beckoning to him.

  In the emptiness of the fenced plot the bodies of the man and the boy seemed to occupy space which, too, should have been empty. The lank body of William and the thin body of the boy roped him to the present. He shut his eyes. In his mind now he could see only the seared and smouldering earth, the bare hot cinder of a still unpeopled world. He felt as he stood with his eyes closed on the destruction of what his heart had wished destroyed that by some generous gesture he had been turned once more into the first pasture of things.

  I will build the new house further down the creek, he thought. All on one floor.

  The men had come towards him. William’s hand was on his sleeve.

  We were waiting for you, William said. It was nobody’s fault. I’ve seen it happen time and again. It’s the women left, the meals that will never be ate, it’s the heat and the frost and the empty spaces.

  Tell him straight out, the boy said, that Greta burned the house and no one knows where Lenchen is. Make him speak.

  Lenchen, James said. He looked at the burnt ground.

  I left her here, he said.

  And Greta, the boy said. It was her face we saw behind the honey-suckle. Where have you been that you left the two of them alone at such a time, and come back two nights and a day later dressed up in a new shirt.

  James dug his toe into the edge of the ash, but he said nothing.

  What made Greta set fire to things? William asked.

  James looked up at him.

  God knows, he said, we both had reason to wish the place gone and everything in it.

  James turned to the boy. What could he say of the light that had made him want to drink fire into his darkness. Of the child got between the leafless trees when the frost was stiff in the branches. Of beating up Kip and running off because Kip had been playing round with the glory of the world.

  I ran away, he said, but I circled and ended here the way a man does when h
e’s lost.

  I’ve a notion, William said, that a person only escapes in circles no matter how far the rope spins.

  There was Greta as well as James, the boy said.

  James turned away leading his horse as he went.

  We best go down the creek, William said, and then we can think what to do. Ara’ll make you welcome, he said to James, as long as you care to stop.

  I wouldn’t speak for Ma, the boy said.

  He turned to James.

  Tell me, he said, what would a girl do?

  19

  By Felix Prosper’s stove the Widow sat with James’s child across her knee.

  Felix didn’t do bad for a man, Angel said. Especially for a man who never raised a hand to help one of his own mares in foal. I doubt whether he ever knew the difference between what just happened and what other people did.

  Hush, the Widow said. It’s no time for remembering. Remembering churns grief to anger.

  She laid her hand on the baby’s back.

  Dear God, she said, what a straight back he has.

  He’ll need it, Angel said, to carry round what the world will load on his shoulders.

  20

  Felix stood at the edge of his own brown pool. Kip sat on the bank beside him.

  When a house is full of women, Kip said, and one of them Angel, it’s best for a man to take his rest among the willows.

  When a house is full of women and children, Felix said, a man has to get something for their mouths.

  I’ve seen a bird, Kip said, wear itself thin doing just that. A bird with a whole nestful of beaks open and asking.

  Felix played his line.

  I keep thinking about James, Kip said. I kept at him like a dog till he beat around the way a porcupine beats with his tail.

  Felix moved down the creek a little.