”Yes.” He heaved a large and rather comical sigh. “Is it the object I fear beyond all others? Is it the dread shape of Mrs. Beech’s mailbox?”
“Aye. And it’s there we must part.”
“If you say we must, we must. Yet I wish—” Just then the wind shifted, as it sometimes did in the summer, and blew a strong gust out of the west. The smell of sea-salt was gone in an instant, and so was the sound of the drunken, singing voices. What replaced them was a sound infinitely more sinister, one that never failed to produce a scutter of gooseflesh up her back: a low, atonal noise, like the warble of a siren being turned by a man without much longer to live.
Will took a step backward, eyes widening, and again she noticed his hands take a dip toward his belt, as if reaching for something not there.
“What in gods’ name is that?”
“It’s a thinny,” she said quietly. “In Eyebolt Canyon. Have ye never heard of such?”
“Heard of, yes, but never heard until now. Gods, how do you stand it? It sounds alive!”
She had never thought of it quite like that, but now, in a way listening with his ears instead of her own, she thought he was right. It was as if some sick part of the night had gained a voice and was actually trying to sing.
She shivered. Rusher felt the momentary increased pressure of her knees and whickered softly, craning his head around to look at her.
“We don’t often hear it so clearly at this time of year,” she said. “In the fall, the men bum it to quiet.”
“I don’t understand.”
Who did? Who understood anything anymore? Gods, they couldn’t even turn off the few oil-pumps in Citgo that still worked, although half of them squealed like pigs in a slaughtering chute. These days you were usually just grateful to find
things that still worked at all.
“In the summer, when there’s time, drovers and cowboys drag loads of brush to the mouth of Eyebolt,” she said. “Dead brush is all right, but live is better, for it’s smoke that’s wanted, and the heavier the better. Eye-bolt’s a box canyon, very short and steep-walled. Almost like a chimney lying on its side, you see?”
“Yes.”
“The traditional time for burning is Reap Mom—the day after the fair and the feast and the fire.”
“The first day of winter.”
“Aye although in these parts it doesn’t feel like winter so soon. In any case it’s no tradition; the brush is sometimes lit sooner, if the winds have been prankish or if the sound’s particularly strong. It upsets the livestock, you know—cows give poorly when the noise of the thinny’s strong—and it makes sleep difficult.”
“I should think it would.” Will was still looking north, and a stronger gust of wind blew his hat off. It fell to his back, the rawhide tugstring pulling against the line of his throat. The hair so revealed was a little long, and as black as a crow’s wing.
She felt a sudden, greedy desire to run her hands through it, to let her fingers tell its texture—rough or smooth or silky? And how would it smell? At this she felt another shiver of heat down low in her belly. He turned to her as though he had read her mind, and she flushed, grateful that he wouldn’t be able to see the darkening of her cheek.
“How long has it been there?”
“Since before I was born,” she said, “but not before my da was born. He said that the ground shook in an earthquake just before it came. Some say the earthquake brought it, some say that’s superstitious nonsense. All I know is that it’s always been there. The smoke quiets it awhile, the way it will quiet a hive of bees or wasps, but the sound always comes back. The brush piled at the mouth helps to keep any wandering livestock out, too—sometimes they’re drawn to it, gods know why. But if a cow or sheep does happen to yet in—after the burning and before the next year’s pile has started to grow, mayhap—it doesn’t come back out. Whatever it is, it’s hungry.”
She put his poncho aside, lifted her right leg over the saddle without so much as touching the horn, and slipped off Rusher—all this in a single liquid movement. It was a stunt made for pants rather than a dress, and she knew from the further
widening of his eyes that he’d seen a good lot of her . . . but nothing she had to wash with the bathroom door closed, so what of that? And that quick dismount had ever been a favorite trick of hers when she was in a showoffy mood.
“Pretty!” he exclaimed.
“I learned it from my da,” she said, responding to the more innocent interpretation of his compliment. Her smile as she handed him the reins, however, suggested that she was willing to accept the compliment any way it was meant.
“Susan? Have you ever seen the thinny?”
“Aye, once or twice. From above.”
“What does it look like?”
“Ugly,” she responded at once. Until tonight, when she had observed Rhea’s smile up close and endured her twiddling, meddling fingers, she would have said it was the ugliest thing she had ever seen. “It looks a little like a slow-burning peat fire, and a little like a swamp full of scummy green water. There’s a mist that rises off it. Sometimes it looks like long, skinny arms. With hands at the end of em.”
“Is it growing?”
“Aye, they say it is, that every thinny grows, but it grows slowly. ‘Twon’t escape Eyebolt Canyon in your time or mine.”
She looked up at the sky, and saw that the constellations had continued to tilt along their tracks as they spoke. She felt she could talk to him all night—about the thinny, or Citgo, or her irritating aunt, or just about anything—and the idea dismayed her. Why should this happen to her now, for the gods’ sake? After three years of dismissing the Hambry boys, why should she now meet a boy who interested her so strangely? Why was life so unfair?
Her earlier thought, the one she’d heard in her father’s voice, recurred to her: If it’s ka, it’ll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than a barn before a cyclone.
But no. And no. And no. So set she, with all her considerable determination, her mind against the idea. This was no bam; this was her life.
Susan reached out and touched the rusty tin of Mrs. Beech’s mailbox, as if to steady herself in the world. Her little hopes and daydreams didn’t mean so much, perhaps, but her father had taught her to measure herself by her ability to do the things she’d said she would do, and she would not overthrow his teachings simply because she happened to encounter a good-looking boy at a time when her body
and her emotions were in a stew.
“I’ll leave ye here to either rejoin yer friends or resume yer ride,” she said. The gravity she heard in her voice made her feel a bit sad, for it was an adult gravity.
“But remember yer promise, Will—if ye see me at Seafront—Mayor’s House—and ifye’d be my friend, see me there for the first time. As I’d see you.”
He nodded, and she saw her seriousness now mirrored in his own face. And the sadness, mayhap. “I’ve never asked a girl to ride out with me, or if she’d accept a visit of me. I’d ask of you, Susan, daughter of Patrick—I’d even bring you flowers to sweeten my chances—but it would do no good, I think.”
She shook her head. “Nay. Twouldn’t.”
“Are you promised in marriage? It’s forward of me to ask, I know, but I mean no harm.”
“I’m sure ye don’t, but I’d as soon not answer. My position is a delicate one just now, as I told ye. Besides, it’s late. Here’s where we part, Will. But stay . . . one more moment . . .”
She rummaged in the pocket of her apron and brought out half a cake wrapped in a piece of green leaf. The other half she had eaten on her way up to the Coos … in what now felt like the other half of her life. She held what was left of her little evening meal out to Rusher, who sniffed it, then ate it and nuzzled her hand. She smiled, liking the velvet tickle in the cup of her palm. “Aye, thee’s a good horse, so ye are.”
She looked at Will Dearborn, who stood in the road, shuffling his dusty boots and gazing at her unhappily. The hard look was gone from his face, now; he looked her age again, or younger. “We were well met, weren’t we?” he asked.