There was a sense, somehow, that this was it: a last roundup, and they'd never be together again, at least not like this, in the lassitude of survival, thankfulness and drunkenness.
The next day Sally made the arrangements for her grandfather, and a hearse from a mortuary in Pensacola came by to pick up the body. The mortician had the death certificate, and nobody seemed particularly bothered by the legality of it. Old men died, it happened all the time, and this fellow was in his eighties without a mark on his body.
The mortician he seemed somehow to be a deputy sheriff, too assured Sally there'd be no problems at all, especially when Earl paid out a nice lump of change for him.
The next day, it was Earl who drove Sally to Pensacola for the long trip to Montana by train, and for burial for Mr. Ed.
Earl parked in front of the station, which was all jammed up with Navy personnel in their whites and their girls and folks and kids. A lot of hubbub floated in the air, and Earl could see the big steam train hissing and puffing at the head of its cars.
'You are a special one,' he told her.
'So are you, Earl.'
'Where will you go? Have you a place?'
'My aunt. Grandpap's other daughter. She's been after me for years.
It'll be fine. I'll be all right, Earl, don't you worry. Don't I seem, like the type who makes out just fine?'
'You do. But let me tell you this: Young men are going to come courting hard now. You pick the best. You deserve the best. If you wind up with some no-good, old Uncle Earl will visit you and kick his butt and give you what-for, do you understand?'
'Well, Earl, as I have not done a single thing you ever told me, why should I do that?'
'I'm hoping you'll change your wild ways. Lord, I wish I was twenty years a younger man. I'd give them young bucks a run for their damn money.'
'Well, guess what happens now? You have to kiss me. It's how the story ends. Don't you see? Prince Charming kisses Snow White and releases her from her spell and so she doesn't have to live in the woods with the Seven Dwarfs anymore.'
'I ain't no prince and I certainly ain't charming. Though I would admit them other fellows was mostly dwarfs. And you're not a princess.
You're a queen, you just don't know it yet. So I shouldn't be kissing so far above myself.'
'Well, as I sewed your ear back on and did a nice damn job on it, I will determine what happens, and for now you will kiss me. And that will be that. The queen has spoken.'
'You were the toughest and the bravest. Do you know that?'
'I just tried to live up to grand pap standards, and then to old Uncle Earl's.'
'You done that, and how.'
He kissed her, hard, just to see what it would feel like, and of course it felt exactly as he knew it would, and an electricity of regret flashed through him and then it was over and no more. She smiled and laughed, and got out of the car.
'Do you need help?'
'Earl, if I don't get away, I'll never leave. You go on, I can handle this little suitcase.'
She grabbed it and took off, without looking back.
He watched her go, and damn, as had happened so rarely in his life but happened this time, some kind of grit came sailing through the window and clouded up his eyes, and the thin young woman walked away and back to whatever her life would be, disappearing in a squall of sailors.
When Earl got back, Audie and Charlie had left. Audie had made a phone call, and he yelled out a big whoop-de-do when he hung up. He had gotten that big part in that Civil War picture. He'd play a hero. He had to leave right away, as he had to get back for what Elmer reported was called 'wardrobe' by the end of the week, and since he was going west, he'd drive Charlie back to Texas.
Anyhow, those two boys would have some fun together. And maybe it was better that all the parting took place in this strange way, without much of a final ceremony, just in little dribs and drabs. These were not men who spoke clearly of things they felt, and more often ran from them. So it was best for everybody that they just separated without much palaver.
Only little Elmer was left, and he helped Earl clear the house. All the leftover provisions were buried, the beds stripped, everything returned to normal. The lease still had some time to run, and Earl allowed it best to let it run out, so no authority could ever link the abandonment of the farm in Florida with the strange events in Thebes two states over, though the only news so far was something Elmer heard on the radio about a flood in southeastern Mississippi, and the destruction it had wrought. It didn't seem like anybody was making a big to-do about it.
And then they were done and each was set to head off in a different direction.
'So Earl, tell me now: Was it worth it?'
'I think so,' Earl said. 'But it all fades from memory fast, don't it?'
'Yes, it does. But I want your conviction, Earl. We did the right thing, didn't we?'
'I would say we did.'
'A lot of men died that night. I never killed a man before. It's different than a game animal, who's lived a magnificent life and whose meat will honor my table as his head will honor my medicine lodge. But you don't put no human heads on no walls, and maybe those boys thought they was serving a moral purpose.'
'Maybe they did.'
'So I don't know, Earl. Maybe we'd have been best off to leave it all alone.'
'I think we done right, Mr. Kaye. Something bad ugly wrong was going on down there you could sense it yourself.'
'That I could. It was the last stop at the end of the world, where there are no rules.'
'Well, we were the ones that stopped it. Maybe there were other ways to stop it, but I don't know them. And maybe what follows won't be much better, but by God, one thing I know is it'll be different. Maybe different is better enough.'
'We shall see.'
'We shall, indeed.'
'I will say this, Earl. It was a hell of a fight. I will always take pleasure in the fight I fought and in the men I fought it with. It was a hell of a fight.' 'Yes, sir,' said Earl, 'it was the best damned fight I ever saw, that I deeply believe. And I've seen some fights in my time.'
And with that, they parted, sworn between themselves by deepest bond to never speak of such things again.
The boy was watching. He sat alone in the late afternoon, intent upon his task on the porch of the white house on the hill. He never spoke much, but he'd been speaking even less since his father had disappeared.
But he was a not icer a collector of information. He saw things, he tracked things, he filed them away for later recall and examination.
He could see a flock of black crows in the trees off to the left. He knew they'd flown in from the west and would settle the night and fly out to the east in the morning at dawn. He could see the yellow thatch where the dried-out grass had lost its color, but knew also that it contained teeming wet microscopic life under the apparent dryness. He could see the occasional southward flight of Vs of high geese and duck, their trumpeting far off and incomplete. It was getting cooler. He sat, he watched, he waited. He thought.
He knew other things. He knew his mother was desperately unhappy. He felt her tension, and it frightened him. She wasn't speaking much these days either. The two of them lived in silence, ate in silence, slept in silence. His mother had become a different kind of watcher; she was the sort who watched, but never saw. She would stare for hours out the window and see nothing at all. Her fear had made her haggard.
Though to the boy she was beautiful and would always be beautiful, he saw enough through his idealizations to realize that she was losing weight, her bones were showing, the knobs in her face were sharpening, and there was an emptiness coming into her eyes The father was simply gone. It had been weeks now, and it cast a dark spell across the farm.
It seemed even the plants felt it, and they withered in the sun, and now that it had begun to cool with the coming of autumn, everything seemed in a rush to go to brown The boy would wake up in the night, sure he'd heard
