A black and white farm collie with just one eye barked at me through the yard fence when I stepped out of the car. I tried to calm him down by talking to him, but he was afraid of me and he wouldn't be calmed. Eventually an old woman wearing an apron came out of the house and silenced the dog with a word. She called to me: `Mr. Harley's in the barn.'
I let myself in through the wire gate. `May I talk to you?'
`That depends what the talk's about.'
`Family matters.'
`If that's another way to sell insurance, Mr. Harley doesn't believe in insurance.'
`I'm not selling anything. Are you Mrs. Harley?'
`I am.'
She was a gaunt woman of seventy, square-shouldered in a long-sleeved, striped shirtwaist. Her gray hair was drawn back severely from her face. I liked her face, in spite of the broken-ness in and around the eyes. There was humor in it, and suffering half transformed into understanding.
`Who are you?' she said.
`A friend of your son Harold's. My name is Archer.'
`Isn't that nice? We're going to sit down to supper as soon as Mr. Harley finishes up the milking. Why don't you stay and have some supper with us?'
`You're very kind.'
But I didn't want to eat with them.
`How is Harold?' she said. `We don't hear from him so often since he married his wife. Lila.'
Evidently she hadn't heard the trouble her sons were in. I hesitated to tell her, and she noticed my hesitation.
`Is something the matter with Harold?' she said sharply.
`The matter is with Mike. Have you seen him?'
Her large rough hands began to wipe themselves over and over on the front of her apron. `We haven't seen Mike in twenty years. We don't expect to see him again in this life.'
`You may, though. He told a man he was coming home.'
`This is not his home. It hasn't been since he was a boy. He turned his back on us then. He went off to Pocatello to live with a man named Brown, and that was his downfall.'
`How so?'
`That daughter of Brown was a Jezebel. She ruined my son. She taught him all the filthy ways of the world.'
Her voice had changed. It sounded as if the voice of somebody slightly crazy was ranting ventriloquially through her. I said with deliberate intent to stop it:
`Carol's been paid back for whatever she did to him. She was murdered in California on Monday.'
Her hands stopped wiping themselves and flew up in front of her. She looked at their raw ugliness with her broken eyes.
`Did Mike do it to her?'
`We think so. We're not sure.'
`And you're a policeman,' she stated.
`More or less.'
`Why do you come to us? We did our best, but we couldn't control him. He passed out of our control long ago.'
Her hands dropped to her sides.
`If he gets desperate enough, he may head this way.'
`No, he never will. Mr. Harley said he would kill him if he ever set foot on our property again. That was twenty years ago, when he ran away from the Navy. Mr. Harley meant it, too. Mr. Harley never could abide a lawbreaker. It isn't true that Mr. Harley treated him cruelly. Mr. Harley was only trying to save him from the Devil.'
The ranting, ventriloquial note had entered her voice again. Apparently she knew nothing about her son, and if she did she couldn't talk about him in realistic terms. It was beginning to look like a dry run.
I left her and went to the barn to find her husband. He was in the stable under the barn, sitting on a milking stool with his forehead against the black and white flank of a Holstein cow. His hands were busy at her teats, and her milk surged in the pail between his knees. Its sweet fresh smell penetrated the smell of dung that hung like corruption in the heated air.
`Mr. Harley?'
`I'm busy,' he said morosely. `This is the last one, if you want to wait.'
I backed away and looked at the other cows. There were ten or twelve of them, moving uneasily in their stanchions as I moved. Somewhere out of sight a horse blew and stamped.
`You're disturbing the livestock,' Mr. Harley said. `Stand still if you want to stay.'
