The Boys in the Trees (22 page)

Drifter Dan often slept in his clothes and Eaton thought he should have done that too, time wasted trying to figure out what had happened to his buttons, until he understood that the shirt was inside out. He crept past his parents’ rooms, his boots hanging from their knotted laces, and stepped down the edges of the back stairs. He was a boy who loved to sleep and he couldn’t remember ever being the only one awake in the house. First light
just beginning to brush the windows, the dark kitchen with its looming shapes, the pools of deeper darkness that became chairs, the woodstove in the corner, only as he stared at them. It was something he’d never noticed, the way darkness was textured, shaded. Part of the way things seemed to be now, nothing simple, not even the difference between the dark and the light. There was a place he sometimes sat when he was smaller, just around the bend in the back stairs, a place where he could hear things. Hear Lucy singing while she worked, and the things she said after his mother rustled out of the room. The things she talked about when Abby used to come and drink mugs of tea at the kitchen table, in the quiet part of an afternoon. Once she told Abby about going to see the Medium in her rented room above Hatch’s grocery. How at first everything was hazy but it slowly became clearer and clearer, until at last she saw her little girl’s face. It had worried him then, knowing that Lucy had been to the place Reverend Toller preached so fiercely against. But that was before, when everything was easy. When he didn’t know what it was like, to need to see the dead again.

•  •  •

One lie was all the Devil needed; that was what Miss Sarah said. What Rachel’s father said once when he came to the Sunday school to hear their verses, when he touched Eaton’s shoulder with his murderous hand. One lie would open the door a crack, and that was enough for the Devil to come slithering in. He knew that, but he also knew that if he was going to do this thing he had to be long gone before Lucy came through the back door, raked up the stove, before his father straightened his collar and sat down with his knife and fork held lightly in his hands. When he’d gone into the sitting room the night before his voice
sounded just the way he’d practiced, saying,
I might go early tomorrow; Miss Alice wants help with something before school
. His parents looked up from their separate pools of light, his mother’s hands flowing with jewel green thread, his father with a small book open on his lap.
Good night, Eaton
, was all they said when he bent to kiss their cheeks, and he braced himself for a voice calling him back as he climbed the stairs, but there was only the sound of his light footsteps.

They would find out, of course they would, but he had pushed that thought away, pushed it away now as he felt around in the dark pantry until he found Lucy’s ginger cake, wrapped in a clean cloth, only three slices gone. She would be angry, but not for very long, and he saw how true it was that one lie, one thing, led to more and more. The evening of that other day his father sat on the edge of his bed and told him there was nothing wrong with crying but that wasn’t the reason; it was just too big a thing for crying. His father said that it wasn’t really something that could be understood, that Rachel’s father had made a mistake, and then another and another, and the trouble piled up until he must have thought it was the only way out of it. He said that no one could have known and Eaton thought that made it even worse, the idea that anything at all could happen at any time, that there was no one there to stop it.

It makes no sense
, he said, and what he meant was that it had been a morning like so many others, around the big table in the schoolroom. Nina was beside Miss Alice, her face scrunched up like it always was when she read aloud, and Rachel was in her place next to him, doing her sums so quickly while he struggled with a problem about bushels of apples. Lucius flicked a plug of paper from across the table and Rachel looked up and stuck her tongue out at him and just then there was knocking at the
outside door, not thunderous, not desperate, just knocking. Miss Alice came back and said that Rachel’s father needed her for a moment and she put down her pencil, left her book lying open on the table. He saw that out of the corner of his eye as he stroked out a number and started again and he didn’t even bother to raise his head as she disappeared through the doorway, walked out into the blue day that swallowed her up. It made no sense that they had all just let her go, that Lucius and Bella had walked right by the house on their way home at lunchtime and there had been nothing for them to notice. It made no sense that no one, not even Miss Alice, had given Rachel more than a passing thought when her chair was empty all afternoon, her book still open on the table. When she was lying dead on her bedroom floor. His father left the lamp burning low that night, left the door ajar, but it made no difference; he still woke screaming.

•  •  •

There was a light in the Barnes’ kitchen, a shape moving near the window, and he thought it might be Miss Alice, conjured up by his lie. He opened the side door carefully, bending down like Drifter Dan did when he crawled through the flap of the tepee to make his escape. Drifter Dan had been raised by Indians, but a different tribe from the one that tortured him in
The Black Rider
, and again in
Deadman’s Gulch;
once he recognized his blood brother, Tuctoya, just as he was about to squeeze the trigger of his Winchester. That was when he was a scout for the army, years after he’d been rescued and brought back to civilization. Back to a place he didn’t remember, where he had to keep his hands clean and sit at a desk in a schoolhouse. Drifter Dan always knew that wherever he was, he only half belonged.

Eaton crouched as low as he could and eased the door closed behind him, counting to twenty before he let it move each fraction. The green smell of wet grass was all around him, slippery on his hands as he made his way around the back of the house, and water from the bushes on the other side dampened his cheek, his shoulder. Then he was standing up and the street was wide open in front of him. He made himself walk slowly, clutching the cloth-wrapped cake against his stomach, made himself move like someone who had every right to be there. The dark was unraveling a little more, first birds stirring, a call and then another, but it was still too early for anyone to be about. No one sweeping a front step, no silent men on their way to the factory, no wagons rattling toward the station. It felt like walking through a ghost town, like being the only thing left alive in a place people had built and then left behind.

•  •  •

They were meeting behind the Murder House and when he peeked around the corner Shiner was already there, sitting on the back steps, looking like he wasn’t bothered. Like they were any back steps leading to any back door. One night during the trial the sound of breaking glass splintered the night and now all the windows were boarded up, another thing that made it strange, and not like a place where a family had ever lived. He thought about how dark it would be behind those boards, real darkness, and he thought about all the things sealed up inside. Beds and chairs and dishes on a table, a book, a newspaper, a jacket hanging on a hook. Like the empty street, rutted by vanished wagons, lined with solid houses, it was a place with only the life sucked out.

There’d be bloodstains too, inside in the dark, and he knew just where, knew where their bodies had fallen. His mother didn’t agree but his father gave him the newspaper to read, said there would be all kinds of wild stories and it would be better if he knew the facts. He read that Rachel made a sound when Constable Street turned her over, that she seemed to move, though she was quite cold, and Eaton ran down the hall, stood in the doorway of his father’s office and said,
She was alive; it says here she was alive
. His father explained in a quiet voice about bodies and gases, how someone who didn’t know could be mistaken. He said of course he would have saved her if he could, would have saved them all.

•  •  •

Shiner said he’d been there all night and maybe he had; his hair was pearled with dew but the step showed bone dry when he shifted over to make room. They ate the ginger cake, saving a bit for Will although neither of them thought he would really come. Then they were thirsty, and the pump screamed when Eaton moved the handle. They were ready to run but no one shouted, no one came, so they drank a little but the water was rusty, bloody tasting. Shiner spat it out too, and he wasn’t afraid of anything. The first time they met him he was crying but that was because he was hurt, his nose a bloody mess and a small white tooth lying in the dust. Eaton and Will might have passed by, except for the story of the Good Samaritan. Shiner jumped up with his fists clenched when they stopped, but he didn’t hit out at them. He said he’d had money from carrying bags at the station, that he’d get even worse if he went home with empty pockets, but they had nothing to give him. Instead they told him about the place where they’d found frogs, hundreds of frogs,
and he said he didn’t mind if they showed him. It was just Eaton’s bad luck that when he came home, late for dinner again, his mother was watching for him, came into the kitchen and saw the state of his boots, his muddy clothes. She made Lucy drag out the tub and fill it and she scrubbed him herself, stinging his skin, until she got tired. Later, Lucy came up the back stairs with a wedge of bread and butter, smoothed his hair and didn’t say a word about the extra work he’d caused her.

•  •  •

He hadn’t dared to bring the watch but Shiner said they didn’t need it, said they’d hear a wagon or two near the time the first train was due, and that would be their signal. Then Eaton remembered that Prince would be shifting his feet in his stall, hungry and waiting, but it was too late to go back, too close to the time when stoves would be heating, people stepping into the day. Another thing he’d be punished for, but he didn’t mind that part so much. It was the thought of Prince’s big dark eyes, the way his ears would be twitching at every sound, trusting in someone who had forgotten all about him.

The ginger cake turned heavy in his stomach and the wooden step was hard; he looked out at the murky yard and thought about the bloodstained house behind his back. The last time he was in this yard it was another season, one of those days that seemed to last forever. At the Band of Hope meeting after church he sat in his usual place, beside know-it-all Robert Bride with his poker-straight back, behind Rachel. There was a faint smell of flowers that he thought came from her, and it reminded him of something. Miss Sarah paced in front of them, telling one of her stories about a happy family, a family that could be their own, and how it had crumbled, the children hungry, begging on
the streets, because of King Alcohol. When she turned toward the window sunlight flashed from her spectacles, as if she was signaling to someone. He watched her pace, flash, turn, pace flash turn, until his eyelids were terribly heavy and he made himself break the spell, remembering what had happened that time Little Jonah fell asleep and slid right off his chair.

He tried to concentrate on Miss Sarah’s voice but the words couldn’t hold him, the story so familiar, so like all her stories. He tried counting instead, to one hundred by twos, by fives and back again, keeping his eyes on Rachel’s head in front of him. And then he thought of touching her hair. He didn’t do it, but for some reason he thought of it, saw his hand with its bitten-down nails tracing the weave of her long, dark plait that seemed to shine in the same sunlight that erased Miss Sarah’s eyes. Just for a moment he thought that, and then chairs scraped as everyone stood up, Miss Sarah swooping her left hand back and forth through the air while they sang “Joyful Be Our Numbers” loud enough to wake every drunkard in town.

Later that afternoon, while Lucy clattered in the kitchen, while his mother slept, her upper lip sprinkled with sugar, he found himself approaching Rachel’s house. He didn’t know why, just as he didn’t know why he’d taken a scout’s route to get there. Around two blocks, down the back lane, through the gap in the fence next door and then bent down, almost on hands and knees, into the tangle of the raspberry patch that marked the edge of the Heaths’ yard. The dry canes rattled, but he moved so slowly that anyone would have thought it was the wind.

Rachel’s sister was in the yard, crouched down by the side of the chicken coop, out of sight of the house. At first he thought she was looking for something she’d dropped, or that maybe she was planting seeds, like Miss Alice in the school garden. The
way her fingers were scrabbling in the dirt. He crept closer, placing each foot carefully, holding his breath until he was as near as he dared to be. Until he could see her fingers in the earth, see the way she raised them to her mouth, a glimpse of her white teeth. The way her lips closed, her jaw moved once or twice, the way she swallowed. The smudges on her chin.

He must have made a sound, some sound, for she was suddenly very still. She raised her eyes and they looked at each other through a mesh of dead canes, maybe eight feet apart, maybe only six. And he couldn’t move and she didn’t move and it seemed they would be frozen that way forever, not even breathing, locked to each other forever. Until a bird cawed, a door opened, a voice called her name. And he scrambled to his feet and began to run, things snatching at him, running faster, tearing his Sunday shirt on the splintered fence, running as if something was right behind him.

•  •  •

He thought about telling Shiner what he’d seen that day, but something in him was uneasy about saying it out loud. It was one of those things, and there seemed to be more and more of them, that floated around in his head, things he didn’t have a place to put. Every day Rachel went to meet her father coming home and they walked together, her father looking down at her, Rachel looking up. They walked together like that every day, like two people who loved each other more than anything. Eaton had that picture in his head, and he couldn’t get it to fit with what had happened. Shiner’s father, so free with his fists and boots, that would have made some sense, but Shiner was still alive, sitting beside him on the hard wooden step while the daylight opened up the yard, the loose-boarded shed, the leftover stalks of last year’s garden.