slope began, already whitening, and he couldn’t believe what he saw. A man was coming down the slope, tiny and dark and furiously animate against the pale field, a dark malevolent stain bleeding down a Currier amp; Ives winterscape. A dark shifting cloud of birds came out of the woods. A cardinal arced from tree to tree like a bright drop of blood.
He went on. After a while the snow was deep enough so that he was leaving tracks but it didn’t seem to matter. He had come to feel that Sutter trailed him by some means that neither of them understood, some curious duality of their natures that enabled Sutter to intercept his thoughts and anticipatehis movements.
By dusk the thickly falling snow had drifted against the dark bottoms of treetrunks and filled shadowy stumpholes and stumps wore hats of pale phosphorescence and he was moving through a world of eerie beauty.
By midafternoon thirty or forty men were grouped loosely about the courthouse steps in Ackerman’s Field. They were armed to the last man. Squirrel rifles, shotguns, old pistols brought home from the wars, many with weaponry that would have been more at home on the walls of an antique shop and weaponry designed to slay beasts long extinct. They carried sacks or lunchbuckets and some of them had thermos bottles of coffee and a search would have yielded up more than a few halfpints of whiskey. They hunkered or milled about in loose groups talking among themselves and chewing and smoking, and there was about them an air of excitement restrained, the air of men setting off on an adventure whose outcome is very much a matter of conjecture.
After a while a man in neatly pressed khakis came out of the courthouse and stood on the top step facing them. The door closed behind him on its pneumatic closer and the man dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. The high sheriff of Ackerman’s Field had pale, nearcolorless eyes and wavy hair going prematurely gray.
Gentlemen, he said.
The door opened and a deputy came out. He as well in khakis. He stood slightly behind Bellwether, and there was something of deference in his manner. We’ve got two trucks with sideboards, Bellwether said. There’s no point in taking more vehicles than necessary. Deputy Garrison and I will go in the county car, and the Holt brothers will bring you all behind us in their trucks. We’ve got a bunch of flashlights in the trucks. Everybody make sure you get a light and make sure it works.
What about the state?
For right now they’re just manning roadblocks. Every road leading out of Ackerman’s Field and every road out of Centre will be secured.
Shit, somebody in the crowd said. Roads ain’t nothin to Granville. He can be in Alabama and never come out of the woods cept to steal somethin to eat.
Where we goin? another man called.
Last place we know for sure he was at was Claude Calvert’s place. That’s where the wagonload of bodies came from. I reckon you all know about that. We can get to there fairly easy with trucks. From there we’ll just have to play it by ear.
It’s a waste of time, the man said. It’s three or four hundred square miles in there. What are we lookin for, clues? Fingerprints? He’s long gone from there.
He may well be, Bellwether said. But all the same it’s got to be done. You understand this is purely a voluntary thing. Nobody has to come don’t want to.
I never said nothin about not goin, the man said, but what about Fenton Breece?
What about him?
What all Sandy told about the way he done them dead folks. About diggin up some graves.
Well, Bellwether said, right now it’s first things first. I meanno disrespect for the dead when I say it’s the live folks I got to worry about right now.
I hear some folks in Centre got that under control, another said and laughed.
Hey, Bellwether, Old Tippydo over in Centre knows the Harrikin better than anybody else. You sent for him?
Bellwether smiled a small smile. I tried, but it didn’t do any good, he said. Tippydo’s done been dead two years, and I couldn’t find a volunteer to go after him.
Sutter quit worrying about keeping to Tyler’s trail for he had divined that he meant to get back to Bookbinder’s. That’s all right, he told himself. Two fish in a barrel ain’t much harder than one fish in a barrel. He was crazed all over with dried blood and his body ached with soreness but he kept pushing himself on through the snow. It was falling harder now and the woods were filling up and it was heavy going, but he knew where he was bound.
Once after dark he stopped to rest and smoke a cigarette, and far off on the hillside he saw a long line of lights moving in a slow curve around the face of the hill. The lights were disembodied and seemingly sourceless. Distant and silent and stately as a wending line of torchbearers making pilgrimage to some obscure god. All in silence as if all this was preordained and speech could neither help nor hinder its outcome. They scattered and regrouped and spread again like a curious ballet of fireflies or St. Elmo’s fire roiled and swirling in the depths of the sea. He watched them for a time in bewilderment then he put out his cigarette in the snow and took uphis rifle and went on.
It was some time before it occurred to Sutter that they were looking for him.
That boy was all right. He was kind of curious turned, but to tell you the truth I sort of liked him. He’d speak to you. Not like some of these young fellers thinks the world didn’t start till the doctor slapped em on the ass.
There is about these old men who have arranged themselves about the coal stove in Patton’s store a curious air of waiting, of time in suspension, as if they had already achieved some remove from the world, the eldest among them awaiting death as calmly as someone waiting on a bus. Beyond them through the plateglass window it is snowing hard and when cars pass to and fro the sound is muted and cloistral and the lights look blurred and unreal, a dream of carlights.
I notice you keep sayin was, another man said. I reckon you done wrote him off, then.
When he run crossways of Sutter I reckon he wrote hisself off. I always thought of that myself as one of the more unpleasant ways you commit suicide.
The old man shook his head. You can say what you want to about him, but if I was able I’d be out there with Bellwether and them scouring the woods.
Leastways some good will come of this. Sutter’s done it this time. The son of a bitch is finally gone way over the line.
A man named Junior Raymer was whittling something unrecognizable but vaguely obscene from soft red cedar. He sat on his upended Coke crate a time studying his creationthen he rose and opened the stove door and tossed it inside. He stirred the fire with the poker and showers of sparks cascaded outward. He spat into them then slammed the door.
Don’t you bet on it, he said. He’s rolled through the cracks before, and he’s fixin to do it again. You mark my words. He’ll be gone like a lost ball in the high weeds.
Talkin about that Tyler boy, the old man said, they must be more to him than meets the eye. Some said that schoolteacher of his worked around and got him a scholarship in a college. Up to Knoxville, they said.
He’ll work, Junior agreed. That’s more than anybody could ever have said about old Moose. Less you count totin sacks of sugar up them hollers back in there. He’d do that. That boy come up hard, him and his sister, too. I used to drink some back when they was little, and I used to lay drunk out there.
Raymer took out a pipe and began to tamp it with roughcut applesmelling tobacco. Someone got up to peer out the window at the snow blanketing the road. The day had waned and the glass had gone a surreal and unearthly gray against whose cold slick surface flakes list and slide with the faintest of ghostsounds and beyond them there is a faint and sourceless fluorescence.
Raymer struck a match on the side of the potbellied heater and lit his pipe. You know, they used to have cockfights in the Harrikin back then. Moose, he fooled with it some. Raised some of them game roosters. Anything there was money in and the work took out of you’d find Moose in it somehow, and don’t nothing draw loafers and lowlifes like a cockfight will. Moose had him one he was real proud of. It was silvercolored and had these little coldlookin eyes like a damn cottonmouthmoccasin. It didn’t look like no chicken I ever seen. It looked like some kind of a weapon.
Anyhow, this boy y’all speakin of was about seven years old. He had this lit old dominecker rooster he raised from a chick. It used to foller him around the way a dog would. That Sunday Moose was about drunk and the boy’s
