Nathaniel (33 page)

“I don’t know. I don’t think so—there isn’t any blood.”

Eric dropped down next to Michael, and reached out to touch the injured leg, but quickly pulled his hand back when Shadow bared his fangs.

“No, Shadow,” Michael said to the dog. “It’s all right. Eric won’t hurt you.” Then, keeping his hands on Shadow’s head, he nodded to Eric. “Go ahead—he won’t bite you.”

Eric still looked uncertain. “How do you know?”

“I know, that’s all,” Michael told him.

Eric took the dog’s leg in his hand, and though a low rumble came from Shadow, and his eyes fixed balefully on Eric’s, he didn’t move. Gingerly, the boy explored the injured leg, and though Shadow yelped twice, he made no move either to pull the leg away or to snap at Eric. Finally Eric released the leg and looked at Michael. “It’s swollen, but there isn’t any cut or anything. It’s like maybe somebody hit him with a stick or something.”

“Is it broken?” Michael asked, his voice anxious.

Eric shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“I bet it was old man Findley,” Ryan said. “I bet he was coming after you with his gun, and Shadow went for him.”

The three boys fell silent, staring at each other, and suddenly Michael felt a chill go up his spine as if someone were watching him from behind. His hands fell away from Shadow, and he scrambled to his feet just as Ben Findley stepped out from behind a tree ten yards away.

The old man glared at them for a moment, then his eyes came to rest on Michael. When he spoke, his voice was hard and angry. “You’re damned lucky I didn’t shoot him,” he said. Only then did Michael see the shotgun that he held loosely in one hand.

At the sound of the old man’s words, Shadow bared his fangs once more, snarled, and struggled to his feet.

“What’d you do to him?” Michael demanded. Findley grinned, exposing crooked teeth.

“Hit him,” he said. “Hit him with the barrel of this here gun, just when he thought he was gonna get me. Now you three get the hell off my land, hear? Get off right now, and don’t come back.”

As he gazed at the old man, the familiar pain began in Michael’s temples, and a thought drifted fleetingly through his mind. I
could make him die … right now
,
I
could make him die …
. And then, barely discernible in the far reaches of his mind, he heard Nathaniel’s voice:
“Not yet. Not now.…”

“I—I didn’t know this was your land,” Michael stammered as his headache passed. “There wasn’t any sign or anything.”

Findley fixed him with a hard look, but then nodded. “That’s why I didn’t shoot the dog,” he said. “If it’d been one of theirs,” he went on, nodding toward Eric and Ryan, “I woulda shot it. They know where my land starts and where it stops. And now you know, too. So take the dog and get off. And don’t come back.”

Slowly the three boys began backing away. For a moment, Shadow held his ground, his yellow eyes flashing even in the filtered light of the woods, but then he, too, began backing off, his gait an awkward hobble as he held his left foreleg off the ground. As the three boys watched, Ben Findley moved deeper into the woods, disappearing almost as if he’d never been there.

“C-come on,” Ryan whispered, breaking the sudden silence that hung over the forest. “Let’s get out of here before he comes back.”

As one, the three boys wheeled around and ran back the way they’d come, not stopping until they were well away from Ben Findley’s land.

Limping clumsily and favoring his injured leg, Shadow struggled to keep up.

When they finally emerged from the woods at the foot of the Halls’ small farm, Michael stopped to stare at the weed-choked acreage of Potter’s Field. Eventually, though, his gaze shifted to Ben Findley’s ancient barn.

“That’s what he really wants us to stay away from,” he whispered, his eyes narrowing angrily. “It’s not the woods he cares about, it’s the barn.”

Ryan and Eric stared at him curiously. “How come? What’s so special about the barn?” Ryan asked.

Michael turned to the other two boys, an odd smile coming over his face. “You really want to know?”

The boys hesitated, then nodded.

“Maybe I’ll show you sometime,” Michael said softly. “Maybe when Shadow’s leg gets better, I’ll show you.”

As the summer wore on, the heat of the prairie filled Janet with a languor she was unused to. At first she attributed it only to the weather, but when she finally talked to a doctor in North Platte about it, she was told that she had to expect her body to concentrate most of its energy on the baby growing inside her and that the best thing she could do was listen to the messages her body was sending her, and take life as easy as possible. And for a while, she was able to relax.

The farm needed little attention, and Michael was more than able to feed their few chickens, tend the cow, and keep the barn in order. Janet concentrated on turning the third bedroom into a nursery, and discovered that even that was no trouble. Just as they had for the farm itself, now people dropped by with things they “thought the baby might be able to use.”

For a while, Janet kept a watchful eye on Michael, but as July passed into August, and he complained less and less about his headaches, she began to feel that perhaps the worst was over. Even Laura seemed to have been calmed by the summer weather.

Laura and Janet had grown closer. As Laura’s strength returned to her, she began spending more and more time at the farm, helping Janet with her first experiments at canning, teaching her the little tricks that made running the farm easier. And she had an endless curiosity about Janet’s life in New York.

At first, Janet assumed that Laura’s primary interest was in her brother, that she wanted to know what Mark had been like in all the years of their estrangement. But as time went on, it became clearer that for Laura, talking to Janet was the closest she would ever come to the life she had always dreamed about, and when Janet described the rhythms of the city, told her about the galleries and museums, the shows and the parties, it was almost as if Laura was experiencing them herself.

It was on a day in late August, when the prairie was shimmering with heat and they were sitting on the front porch whiling away the afternoon by talking about all the things they should be doing—and would do, once the heat broke—that Janet finally asked Laura why she had stayed in Prairie Bend.

Laura smiled, a soft smile that reflected both sadness and longing. “By the time I knew what I wanted, it was too late,” she said. “I was already married, and Ryan was born, and I just let myself drift along. For a while, I thought about taking Ryan and just leaving, but I always seemed to get pregnant just when I had my mind made up. When you’re pregnant, you may feel like running away from home, but it just isn’t practical, is it?”

Janet let one hand fall to the swelling in her torso, then brushed a damp strand of hair from her brow. “Not practical doesn’t begin to express it. It’s funny—when I was pregnant with Michael, I had so much energy I used to frighten Mark. He was always telling me to slow down—take it easier. He was sure I was going to lose the baby. But this time, it’s all different. I don’t even feel like getting up from this chair.”

“You’re not as young as you were then,” Laura pointed out.

“But look at you,” Janet argued. “You weren’t taking it easy in May, and you’re not that much younger than I am.” Then, as Laura’s smile faded away, Janet started to apologize for her careless words, but Laura stopped her.

“It’s all right, Janet,” she said. “And you’re right, I wasn’t taking it easy. But it wouldn’t have made any difference. They would have killed my baby anyway. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t take it easy—sometimes I can pretend that what happened to the baby was my fault. Isn’t that silly? It’s easier for me if I can pretend that the baby would have lived if I’d just done something differently. But it isn’t true. With Becky, I was so terribly careful, and then—well, I won’t go into that anymore.” Suddenly she stood up and went to the end of the porch. Though Janet couldn’t see her face, she knew that Laura was gazing at Potter’s Field.

“I keep thinking I ought to go out there,” Janet said when the silence at last became unbearable. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, and think I ought to go out there and look around that field.”

Laura turned around to face her once more, and when she spoke her voice was low, and slightly trembling. “Do you?” she asked. “Or are you just saying that? Do you really believe what I’ve told you about what’s happened to my babies, or are you just like the doctors, only pretending to believe me?”

Janet had been hoping this confrontation would never come, hoping that her failure to argue with Laura would be enough. But now the question had been asked, and she had to answer it.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It seems totally illogical. I just can’t imagine Amos and Dr. Potter doing such a thing. Amos seems so—well, so steady—and so did Dr. Potter.”

“Then you don’t believe me,” Laura pressed.

Janet sighed heavily, and before she replied, she looked around for Michael. But neither he nor Shadow were anywhere in sight. “Michael believes you,” she said, her voice low.

“Michael?” Laura replied, her voice sounding dazed. ‘What do you mean, Michael believes me? Have you talked to him about it?”

Janet shook her head. “I didn’t have to. He talked about it himself.” Briefly, she told Laura what had happened at the dry goods store the day after they had moved into the little house.

“And then when Ione Simpson said there weren’t any little girls named Becky around here, Michael said he bet Becky had been killed, and buried in Potter’s Field.”

Laura’s face paled, but Janet pressed on. “He seems to think his grandfather killed your baby. Not only that, but he thinks Amos killed Mark, and wants to kill him as well.”

“Dear God,” Laura whispered. “But how does he know?”

“It sounds crazy,” Janet replied, then smiled in spite of herself. “There’s that word again. Anyway, he claims he saw Amos kill Mark in a dream, and he claims he saw something happen to your baby the night it was born.”

“But he wasn’t there—”

“No, he was out here that night—out at the Simpsons’. Eric’s mare was foaling, and Michael was watching. And then on the way home, something happened. He said he fell off his bicycle, but when he got back to the Halls’, he was incredibly upset. He wasn’t hurt, except for a few scratches, but he seemed terrified by something. And then there were the headaches,” she added, though her mind was already on something else. It was only a fleeting memory, an image of Michael, bent over Anna’s chair, while Anna kissed him goodnight.

Except Anna hadn’t been kissing him. She’d been whispering something to him, her voice so low that no one but Michael had been able to hear her.

“Laura,” Janet asked, the memory of that brief whisper refusing to disappear, “what about Anna? Does she know what you think happened to your babies?”

Laura’s face set in bitterness. “She knows. But in the end, she always believes whatever Father tells her. Out here, that’s the way it is. No one believes me, Janet.”

“Except Mark. Mark believed you, didn’t he?”

Laura’s pallor increased, but she said nothing.

“It’s all right,” Janet told her. “I read the letter you wrote him. He left it for me, along with a note.” She fell silent, wondering how much to tell Laura. “The note was strange, Laura,” she said carefully. “It was as if he knew he might die if he came back here.”

“And he did, didn’t he?” Laura replied, her voice lifeless. “It’s my fault, isn’t it? I should never have written to him at all. But I was so frightened. I put that letter off for so long, but then, after I got pregnant again, I just had to write to him. I
had
to, Janet. I never wanted him to come out here—I just wanted him to tell me what happened the night he ran away. But I guess he thought I was crazy, didn’t he?”

Janet nodded. “That’s what I thought, when I read the notes. But now I’m not so sure. What if he believed you? What if he came out here because he believed you?”

“But—”

Janet ignored the interruption. “Your mother, Laura. Let’s go talk to your mother. She must know something.”

Anna’s gaze wandered from Laura to Janet, then returned to her daughter. “I’ve never spoken about that night to anyone,” she said finally. “Why should I tell you about it now?”

Laura’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Because I
have
to know,” she pleaded. “Can’t you understand, Mother? I’ve been terrified most of my life. And my babies. What about my babies, Mother? What really happened to them?”

Anna’s eyes narrowed. “Your babies were born dead, just like mine.”

“Were they, Anna?” Janet asked. “Laura doesn’t think so, and I don’t believe Mark thought so, either.”

“How do you know that?” Anna’s voice rose, and her hands gripped the arms of her chair. For a moment, she seemed about to lift herself up, but then she slumped back. “Did Mark say something?” she asked. “Did he ever talk about the night he left?”

“No,” Janet replied. “But he left me a note. And a letter he’d gotten from Laura.”

“You wrote to him?” Anna demanded of her daughter. “After he abandoned us, you wrote to him?”

Laura hesitated, then nodded her head. “He was my brother. I loved him. And I needed to know why he went away. But now he’s dead, Mother, and so you have to tell us. You
have
to.”

“I don’t have to,” Anna replied, her voice low. “I’ve never talked about that night because I don’t know what happened that night.” Her voice broke, and her eyes filled with tears. “It’s been the same for me as it has for you, Laura. Don’t you understand? I—I thought they killed my baby, too.”

“Dear God,” Janet whispered. “But why? Why would anybody want to kill a baby?”

“I didn’t say they did. I said I thought they did. But I could never prove it. They told me the baby was born dead, and I could never prove it wasn’t. But I felt that baby. I felt that baby alive inside me, and deep inside, I’ve never been able to convince myself that Amos didn’t kill it. And I’ve never forgiven him for it, even though I don’t know if he did it.” Suddenly a twisted smile distorted her face. “Maybe that’s what crippled me,” she whispered. “Maybe this is my punishment for my evil thoughts about my husband.” Her voice turned wistful. “I want to walk, you know. Maybe if I knew myself what happened that night, I might be able to walk again.”