was some promise deep inside. Well, there are no promises, that was the problem; not in drink and not in life, not now and not ever.
The door to the empty house is rattling as the wind picks up; March must have forgotten the latch. Hank is on his way to check when he sees the old man. He just won’t stop. He’s everywhere.
“What do you want?” Hank shouts.
The Coward is wearing a thick black coat Louise Justice brought him one year when the Judge grew tired of it.
“Stop following me around.” Hank can feel his face flush with anger. He doesn’t owe this guy anything, after all, not even courtesy.
The Coward is tall, like Hank, but he weighs perhaps a hundred and twenty pounds. He wants to say something, but instead he stands there, silent, his hands in his pockets.
“I want you to cut it out.” Hank’s actually sweating. Crazy, but he’s nervous being alone with his own father, not that he thinks of him that way. “Okay? Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Hank wishes he could be nastier, but it’s not in his nature. He could, if he wanted, blow this old man over with one breath. He could break him in two.
“Do you understand?” Hank asks, and for some reason he feels a burning behind his eyes, as though he might cry.
The Coward finds his son to be so beautiful it seems inconceivable that they could be the same species. Yet they are; they’re flesh and blood. What he would not give to embrace this boy, to be a father for a minute or a day. But they are at a standstill, with nowhere to go. Here is the most difficult aspect of forgiveness: You have to ask in order to receive it. This, the Coward cannot do. He can stand there, on this cold November day, but he cannot ask for what he needs. And so it is his fate to wait in silence for another day, done in by his own fear, once again.
By the time Hank is done latching the door, the Coward has disappeared back into the woods. Since the hour when Hollis came for him, Hank has never looked back. But he’s looking back now, and when he does he sees that the man on the floor they stepped over when they left that shack was consumed with grief, sick with alcohol. Hank can’t help himself, he pities his father. He almost wishes he hadn’t chased him off. Oh, he knows Hollis would consider this a weakness in him. Pity is for women, and babies, and fools. Your father got what he deserved, that’s what Hollis would say.
No one gets what he deserves, that’s what Hank is thinking now. Things happen, and sometimes it all goes wrong. An entire life can become a dead end. Hank considers this for a very long time, and by the time he’s done thinking, he’s no longer sure that Hollis has all the answers. Before he leaves, Hank goes to the garden shed for the ladder he always used for cleaning out Mrs. Dale’s gutters. It’s a heavy old ladder, but reliable and strong. He leans it against the chestnut tree and climbs up carefully. By tomorrow, Ken Helm will finish lopping off most of the branches, in the hopes that the blight will be stopped and new growth will begin in the spring.
For as long as he can remember, Hank has done as he’s been told; a good boy, dedicated as a dog, thankful for scraps. A fact from Hollis was a fact indeed; no questions asked, and none need be. Now he’s wondering if he’s been misled, and if judgment is not such a simple thing. If he’s a good boy, why did he steal the letters March meant to send? Why, on that day when Hollis came for him, did he not kneel down beside his father and kiss him goodbye, the very least any son could do?
As he goes higher on the old ladder, Hank is unsure of what he believes, but he does know one thing- everyone deserves at least this: fresh air, clear skies, the sight of the earth from the vantage point of an old tree. His hands tremble when he takes the nest, but he’s careful as he comes back down the ladder. He places the nest on the ground while he carries the ladder over to a tall crab apple tree he helped Mrs. Dale plant a few years back. It was one of her favorites, an early bloomer with huge white flowers. Hank brings the ladder over, then grabs the nest, climbs up, and positions the nest into place. When he’s back on the ground, Hank claps his hands together to clean off the dirt. He may not have accomplished much, but at least that’s done. March won’t have to worry about the doves, although, in Hank’s opinion, she had better start to worry about herself instead.
19
Hollis has begun to have his dream about the horse again, that awful dream that always wakes him in the middle of the night and leaves him out of breath and sweaty and ready to run. He supposes that you cannot really murder a horse; that is something humans do to each other. You kill a horse, just as you would a cow or a sheep, but somehow it’s not the same. It’s uglier. It gives you nightmares, year in and year out and maybe even for the rest of your life.
If you are going to do it, Hollis knows, do it speedily and in the dark. Plan it out carefully, and be aware of what hours the grooms and the trainers keep. Make certain to get half your money up front, and be sure it’s a great deal of money. After all, the owner of a dead racehorse stands to collect quite a bit from his insurance company. That’s why he’s paying you. All you have to realize is a single indelible fact: Just because you walk away after you’ve been paid doesn’t mean you won’t be dreaming about it afterwards, when you’re no longer as hungry or as young.
Here’s the thing about killing a horse-its screams are far worse than any sound a man can produce. Wear earplugs, work fast; be sure you’re done and over the fence before they realize their pain. It’s a lot of money for someone with no education and no training and no heart at all. It’s a small fortune, if you can stand the way they scream when you shatter their cannon bones and knees with a hammer or a wrench. When you start to have bad dreams, go back and ask for more money from the owners. Don’t call it blackmail; it’s simply an extra payment for a job well done. After all, the horse wasn’t running well, and that’s what such horses are meant to do. Invest your money wisely, in land and condominiums and the market, and do it before you get hurt, because there will always be a horse who will fight for its life.
That is the one he always dreams about, the last one in Miami, a job so botched the owner never collected, even though the horse had been a Preakness winner and was insured for two million. Horses have hotter blood than humans, that’s what Hollis believes, and he was covered with blood by the time he was finished. He had to stand in the shower for hours, and even then the cold water was a pale remedy. That horse, a white thoroughbred, had refused to go down. Hollis had blood under his fingernails and all over his boots; two weeks later, after he’d headed back to Massachusetts, he was brushing his teeth in the bathroom of his rented rooms above the Lyon Cafe when he found horse’s blood in the rim of his ear. A single red thread which couldn’t tie him to any crime, and could be easily scrubbed away with a damp washcloth, and yet that mark seems to have been a curse. He still does not like to look at himself in the mirror, for fear he’ll see blood, and to this day he despises the color red. That horse continues to follow Hollis while he sleeps. He runs in pastures that are as red as blood; he races through guilt and grief. Kill something, and it’s yours forever. At night, you will be at your victim’s mercy, but that’s only temporary. Dreams, after all, are worthless things-Hollis knows that. They can’t reach you on the street where you walk; they can only torment a man with a conscience, any fool who allows it.
Now that the dream is back, Hollis often gets out of bed in the dark. He leaves March sleeping, and goes to sit in Mr. Cooper’s parlor, in the leather chair where Mr. Cooper liked to relax and smoke his cigars. He watches the light break through the sky above the Farm. Blood buys things and it always has. It was his dream to stand on top of Fox Hill and own everything in sight, and now he has made it all so real that if any trespasser comes by he’ll find himself hauled off to jail. It’s his, the acres of woodland, the houses, the fences, even this chair, where Mr. Cooper liked to read the Sunday paper, unaware that he was being watched through the window by a boy who owned nothing, not even the clothes on his back, which had been paid for out of the goodness of Henry Murray’s heart.
“Everything you have I own,” Alan Murray told Hollis when he came back from his father’s funeral.
Well, he’s fixed that, hasn’t he? Sitting in the dark, Hollis thinks about his money. He thinks about the woman, asleep in his bed. Why is it he continues to feel so poor? Why is he waiting for March to bolt out the door? He’s been worrying about Richard Cooper, who’s not giving up so easily and who has taken to calling. Hollis has been hanging up on him, but sooner or later March will answer the phone, and that won’t do. He’ll see to it the way he’s seen to the mail, so that March hasn’t received any responses from the stores that want to sell her work. A
