hand trembled. He closed his eyes and saw the fjords,
the icy steel-blue waters that were depthless under a
muted sun, and pulled the trigger, biting the inside of
his cheek with anticipation of the shattering explo-
sion that did not happen. The hammer fell with a
snap. He could not believe it. His hand shook so terri-
bly he nearly dropped the gun. What’s wrong, he
wondered. Then he saw looking into the cylinders
that there were only five of them—five shots was all
he had to destroy them all and it wasn’t enough.
He retched and dropped the gun and went out into
the other room where his sons lay slumped over the
table as though asleep. What he saw chased him back
inside the room where the women were and he
snatched up the empty gun without rhyme or reason,
but hoping somehow the fear in him would subside if
he had the gun.
“Stephen,” he said softly. “Stephen.” Calling the
boy to come. The murder out of his heart now. The
madness gone completely. “Stephen . . .”
But the boy did not come, and soon the fear set
into the man and he knew he must run and hide or
they would find him and hang him and the fear of
hanging scared him worse than anything he could
think of.
He swallowed hard as though the rope was already
tightening around his neck, packed a valise with a
few clothes, then paced the room where he and his
wife had slept every night together. They would not
sleep together anymore. It felt to him a relief in a
strange way.
Methodically his mind began to function again and
he went out into the main room carrying his valise
and his empty gun and set them on the table, then
gently lifted each of his sons and placed them side by
side on the floor face down, next to one another and
could not look into their dead eyes as he did, but in-
stead looked at the walls through teary eyes.
And when he finished, he stepped back into the
girl’s room and looked at them lying there, mother
and daughter, clutching each other in death, their
heads thrown back, their mouths agape, their eyes
open and staring off into the void. He gently took the
coverlet and spread it over them up to their necks,
then went out into the cold rain that was partially
snow, too, and hitched the horse to the wagon and
rode away without looking back.
The boy Stephen had been in the privy when he heard
the shots. At first he thought it was the thunder, but it
didn’t sound like thunder exactly. He buttoned up his
pants and crept from the privy and began to go to the
house when he heard the two more shots and saw
flashes of light through one of the windows—Gerthe’s
little window. Instinct told him to hide and hide he
did under the house in a little space he and his broth-
ers had made for just the purpose of hiding from one
another when playing.
He squeezed in there and waited. Above him he
heard heavy footsteps. Papa had always warned them
about the dangers of strangers coming to the house,
especially in the night, like it was now.
“You must be careful of strangers, Willy and Tom
and the rest of you,” his papa would say. “There are
bad men out there” and his papa would fling his arm
toward the outer world. “And sometimes they think
you got something they want, yah, and they come and
bash in your brains and shoot you in the heart and
take whatever it is . . .”
So that is what he thought had happened: that a bad
man had come and was up there now taking what he
wanted from them and that he had shot his papa
maybe and maybe Willy and Tom and the others—his
mama, too.
He didn’t want to breathe for fear the bad man
might hear him. Lying there in the damp cold dark-
ness, the drip of rain, the footsteps of someone walk-
ing around right above his head. It was all he could do
to keep himself from crying out.
Then he heard the door open and close. Mama was
always complaining about the squeaky door. And
pretty soon he heard the tread of a horse’s hoofs
against the wet ground. Someone riding away, and the
rattle of the wagon, too.
The boy squeezed his eyes tight and did not move.
He was afraid.
6
The door to Jake’s hotel room rattled hard under
the knocking. His pocket watch lay face open on
the stand next to his bed. The light in the room was
spare, gray as an old cat’s fur. The watch read 5:30.
He sat up still shaking loose from the dream that had
gripped him: Celine sitting on the side of a bed in a
room full of hot white light rolling up her stockings,
her husband lying dead on the floor between them.
She was smiling up at him, giving him that notorious
look she had a way of perpetuating. He felt frozen,
unable to move or speak. A silver pistol lay on the
carpet next to the dead husband. Then just as sud-
