This made little sense, Latigo had argued. Jonas had smiled and nodded. No, he had said, not a mite of sense, but it doesn’t matter.
Lengyll was prepared to answer questions, but none were asked. There was only the murmur, the dark looks, the muted click and clink of reap-charms as people shifted on their feet.
The boys were in jail. Lengyll made no statement concerning what would happen to them next, and once again he was not asked. He said that some of the activities scheduled for the next day—the games, the rides, the turkey-run, the pumpkin-carving contest, the pig-scramble, the riddling competition, and the dance—had been cancelled out of respect for the tragedy. The things that really mattered would go on, of course, as they always had and must: the cattle and livestock judging, the horse-pull, the sheep-shearing, the stockline meetings, and the auctions: horse, pig, cow, sheep. And the bonfire at moonrise. The bonfire and the burning of the guys. Charyou tree was the end of Reaping Fair-Day, and had been since time out of mind. Nothing would stop it save the end of the world.
“The bonfire will bum and the stuffy-guys will bum on it,” Eldred Jonas had told Lengyll. “That’s all you’re to say. It’s all you need to say.”
And he’d been right, Lengyll saw. It was on every face. Not just the determination to do right, but a kind of dirty eagerness. There were old ways, old rites of which the red-handed stuffy-guys were one surviving remnant. There were los ceremoniosos: Charyou tree. It had been generations since they had been practiced (except, every once and again, in secret places out in the hills), but sometimes when the world moved on, it came back to where it had been.
Keep it brief, Jonas had said, and it had been fine advice, fine advice indeed. He wasn’t a man Lengyll would have wanted around in more peaceful times, but a useful one in times such as these.
“Gods give you peace,” he said now, stepping back and folding his arms with his hands on his shoulders to show he had finished. “Gods give us all peace.”
“Long days and peaceful nights,” they returned in a low, automatic chorus. And then they simply turned and left, to go wherever folks went on the afternoon before Reaping. For a good many of them, Lengyll knew, it would be the Travellers’ Rest or the Bayview Hotel. He raised a hand and mopped his brow. He hated to be out in front of people, and never so much as today, but he thought it had gone well. Very well, indeed.
6
The crowd streamed away without speaking. Most, as Lengyll had foreseen, headed for the saloons. Their way took them past the jail, but few looked at it…
and those few who did, did so in tiny, furtive glances. The porch was empty (save for a plump red-handed stuffy sprawled in Sheriff Avery’s rocker), and the door stood ajar, as it usually did on warm and sunny afternoons. The boys were inside, no doubt about that, but there was no sign that they were being guarded with any particular zeal.
If the men passing on their way downhill to the Rest and the Bayview had banded together into one group, they could have taken Roland and his friends with no trouble whatsoever. Instead, they went by with their heads down, walking stolidly and with no conversation to where the drinks were waiting. Today was not the day. Nor tonight.
Tomorrow, however—
7
Not too far from the Bar K, Susan saw something on the Barony’s long slope of grazing-land that made her rein up and simply sit in the saddle with her mouth open. Below her and much farther east of her position, at least three miles away, a band of a dozen cowboys had rounded up the biggest herd of Drop-runners she had ever seen: perhaps four hundred head in all. They ran lazily, going where the vaqs pointed them with no trouble.
Probably think they’re going in for the winter, Susan thought. But they weren’t headed in toward the ranches running along the crest of the Drop; the herd, so large it flowed on the grass like a cloud-shadow, was headed west, toward
Hanging Rock.
Susan had believed everything Roland said, but this made it true in a personal way, one she could relate directly to her dead father. Horses, of courses.
“You bastards,” she murmured. “You horse-thieving bastards.” She turned Pylon and rode for the burned-out ranch. To her right, her shadow was growing long.
Overhead, the Demon Moon glimmered ghostly in the daylight sky.
8
She had worried that Jonas might have left men at the Bar K—although why he would’ve she didn’t really know, and the fear turned out to be groundless in any case. The ranch was as empty as it had been for the five or six years between the fire that had put paid to it and the arrival of the boys from In-World. She could see signs of that morning’s confrontation, however, and when she went into the bunkhouse where the three of them had slept, she at once saw the gaping hole in the floorboards. Jonas had neglected to close it up again after taking Alain’s and Cuthbert’s guns.
She went down the aisle between the bunks, dropped to one knee, and looked into the hole. Nothing. Yet she doubted if what she had come for had been there in the first place—the hole wasn’t big enough.
She paused, looking at the three cots. Which was Roland’s? She supposed she could find out—her nose would tell her, she knew the smell of his hair and skin very well—but she thought she would do better to put such soft impulses behind her. What she needed now was to be hard and quick—to move without pausing or looking back.
Ashes, Aunt Cord whispered in her head, almost too faintly to hear. Susan shook her head impatiently, as if to clear that voice away, and walked out back.
There was nothing behind the bunkhouse, nothing behind the privy or to either side of it. She went around to the back of the old cook-shack next, and there she found what she’d come looking for, placed casually and with no attempt at concealment: the two small barrels she had last seen slung over Caprichoso’s back.
The thought of the mule summoned the thought of Sheemie, looking down at her from his man’s height and with his hopeful boy’s face. I’d like to take a fin de ano kiss from ye, so I would.
Sheemie, whose life had been saved by “Mr. Arthur Heath.” Sheemie, who had risked the wrath of the witch by giving Cuthbert the note meant for her aunt.
Sheemie, who had brought these barrels up here. They had been smeared with soot to partially camouflage them, and Susan got some on her hands and the sleeves of her shirt as she took off the tops— more ashes. But the firecrackers were still inside: the round, fist-sized big-bangers and the smaller ladyfingers.
She took plenty of both, stuffing her pockets until they bulged and carrying more in her arms. She stowed them in her saddlebags, then looked up at the sky. Three-thirty. She wanted to get back to Hambry no earlier than twilight, and that meant at least an hour to wait. There was a little time to be soft, after all.
Susan went back into the bunkhouse and found the bed which had been Roland’s easily enough. She knelt beside it like a child saying bedtime prayers, put her face against his pillow, and inhaled deeply.
“Roland,” she said, her voice muffled. “How I love thee. How I love thee, dear.”
She lay on his bed and looked toward the window, watching the light drain away.
Once she raised her hands in front of her eyes, examining the barrel-soot on her fingers. She thought of going to the pump in front of the cookhouse and washing, but decided not to. Let it stay. They were ka-tet, one from many—strong in purpose and strong in love.
Let the ashes stay, and do their worst.
9
My Susie has’er faults, but she’s always on time. Pat Delgado used to say. Fearful punctual, that girl.
It was true on the night before Reap. She skirted her own house and rode up to the Travellers’ Rest not ten minutes after the sun had finally gone behind the hills, filling the High Street with thick mauve shadows.
The street was eerily deserted, considering it was the night before Reap; the band which had played in Green Heart every night for the last week was silent; there were periodic rattles of firecrackers, but no yelling, laughing children; only a few of the many colored lamps had been lit.
Stuffy-guys seemed to peer from every shadow-thickened porch. Susan shivered at the sight of their blank white-cross eyes.