“I’m going to bring him in.”
“You always were a murderous bastard.”
“Come on, Evans,” the down-state man said. “We’re wasting time in here.”
“You remember what I said about the shooting,” Mr. John said very quietly.
“I heard you,” the down-state man said.
The two men went out through the store and unhitched their light wagon and drove off. Mr. John watched them go up the road. Evans was driving and the down-state man was talking to him.
“Henry J. Porter,” Mr. John thought. “The only name I can remember for him is Splayzey. He had such big feet he had to have made-to-order boots. Splayfoot they called him. Then Splayzey. It was his tracks by the spring where that Nester’s boy was shot that they hung Tom for. Splayzey. Splayzey what? Maybe I never did know. Splayfoot Splayzey, Splayfoot Porter? No it wasn’t Porter.”
“I’m sorry about those baskets, Mrs. Tabeshaw,” he said. “It’s too late in the season now and they don’t carry over. But if you’d be patient with them down at the hotel you’d get rid of them.”
“You buy them, sell at the hotel,” Mrs. T abeshaw suggested.
“No. They’d buy them better from you,” Mr. John told her. You’re a fine looking woman.”
“Long time ago,” Mrs. Tabeshaw said.
“Suzy, I’d like to see you,” Mr. John said.
In the back of the store he said, “Tell me about it.”
“I told you already. They came for Nickie and they waited for him to come home. His youngest sister let him know they were waiting for him. When they were sleeping drunk Nickie got his stuff and pulled out. He’s got grub for two weeks easy and he’s got his rifle and young Littless went with him.”
“Why did she go?”
“I don’t know, Mr. John. I guess she wanted to look after him and keep him from doing anything bad. You know him.”
“You live up by Evans’s. How much do you think he knows about the country Nick uses?”
“All he can. But I don’t know how much.”
“Where do you think they went?”
“I wouldn’t know, Mr. John. Nickie knows a lot of country.”
“That man with Evans is no good. He’s really bad.”
“He isn’t very smart.”
“He’s smarter than he acts. The booze has him down. But he’s smart and he’s bad. I used to know him.”
“What do you want me to do.”
“Nothing, Suzy, Let me know about anything.”
“I’ll add up my stuff, Mr. John, and you can check it.”
“How are you going home?”
“I can get the boat up to Henry’s Dock and then get a rowboat from the cottage and row down and get the stuff. Mr. John, what will they do with Nickie?”
“That’s what I’m worried about.”
“They were talking about getting him put in the reform school.”
“I wish he hadn’t killed that buck.”
“So does he. He told me he was reading in a book about how you could crease something with a bullet and it wouldn’t do it any harm. It would just stun it and Nickie wanted to try it. He said it was a damn fool thing to do. But he wanted to try it. Then he hit the buck and broke his neck. He felt awful about it. He felt awful about trying to crease it in the first place.”
“I know.”
“Then it must have been Evans found the meat where he had it hung up in the old springhouse. Anyway somebody took it.”
“Who could have told Evans?”
“I think it was just that boy of his found it. He trails around after Nick all the time. You never see him. He could have seen Nickie kill the buck. That boy’s no good, Mr. John. But he sure can trail around after anybody. He’s liable to be in this room right now.”
“No,” said Mr. John. “But he could be listening outside.”
“I think he’s after Nick by now,” the girl said.
“Did you hear them say anything about him at the house?”
“They never mentioned him,” Suzy said.
“Evans must have left him home to do the chores. I don’t think we have to worry about him till they get home to Evans’s.”
“I can row up the lake to home this afternoon and get one of our kids to let me know if Evans hires anyone to do the chores. That will mean he’s turned that boy loose.”
“Both the men are too old to trail anybody.”
“But that boy’s terrible, Mr. John, and he knows too much about Nickie and where he would go. He’d find them and then bring the men up to them.”
“Come in back of the post office,” Mr. John said.
Back of the filing slits and the lockboxes and the registry book and the flat stamp books in place along with the cancellation stamps and their pads, with the General Delivery window down, so that Suzy felt again the glory of office that had been hers when she had helped out in the store, Mr. John said, “Where do you think they went, Suzy?”
“I wouldn’t know, true. Somewhere not too far or he wouldn’t take Littless. Somewhere that’s really good or he wouldn’t take her. They know about the trout for trout dinners, too, Mr. John.”
“That boy?”
“Sure.”
“Maybe we better do something about the Evans boy.”
“I’d kill him. I’m pretty sure that’s why Littless went along. So Nickie wouldn’t kill him.”
“You fix it up so we keep track of them.”
“I will. But you have to think out something, Mr. John. Mrs. Adams, she’s just broke down. She just gets a sick headache like always. Here. You better take this letter.”
“You drop it in the box,” Mr. John said. “That’s United States mail.”
“I wanted to kill them both last night when they were asleep.”
“No,” Mr. John told her. “Don’t talk that way and don’t think that way.”
“Didn’t you ever want to kill anybody, Mr. John?”
“Yes. But it’s wrong and it doesn’t work out.”
“My father killed a man.”
“It didn’t do him any good.”
“He couldn’t help it.”
“You have to learn to help it,” Mr. John said. “You get along now, Suzy.”
“I’ll see you tonight or in the morning,” Suzy said. “I wish I still worked here, Mr. John.”
“So do I, Suzy, But Mrs. Packard doesn’t see it that way.”
“I know,” said Suzy. “That’s the way everything is.”
Nick and his sister were lying on a browse bed under a lean-to that they had built together on the edge of the hemlock forest looking out over the slope of the hill to the cedar swamp and the blue hills beyond.
“If it isn’t comfortable, Littless, we can feather in some more balsam on that hemlock. We’ll be tired tonight and this will do. But we can fix it up really good tomorrow.”
“It feels lovely,” his sister said. “Lie loose and really feel it, Nickie.”
“It’s a pretty good camp,” Nick said. “And it doesn’t show. We’ll only use little fires.”
“Would a fire show across to the hills?”
“It might,” Nick said. “A fire shows a long way at night. But I’ll stake out a blanket behind it. That way it won’t show.”
“Nickie, wouldn’t it be nice if there wasn’t anyone after us and we were just here for fun?”
“Don’t start thinking that way so soon,” Nick said. “We just started. Anyway if we were just here for fun we wouldn’t be here.”
“I’m sorry, Nickie.”
“You don’t need to be,” Nick told her. “Look, Littless, I’m going down to get a few trout for supper.”
“Can I come?”
“It was tough in the slashings, wasn’t it? I thought it was really hard. Did I do all right?”
“You did wonderfully and you were wonderful making camp. But you take it easy now.”
“Have we got a name for this camp?”
“Let’s call it Camp Number One,” Nick said.
He went down the hill toward the creek and when he had come almost to the bank he stopped and cut himself a willow stick about four feet long and trimmed it, leaving the bark on. He could see the clear fast water of the stream. It was narrow and deep and the banks were mossy here before the stream entered the swamp. The dark clear water flowed fast and its rushing made bulges on the surface. Nick did not go close to it as he knew it flowed under the banks and he did not want to frighten a fish by walking on the bank.
There must be quite a few up here in the open now, he thought. It’s pretty late in the summer.
He took a coil of silk line out of a tobacco pouch he carried in the left breast pocket of his shirt and cut a length that was not quite as long as the willow stick and fastened it to the tip where he had notched it lightly. Then he fastened on a hook that he took from the pouch; then holding the shank of the hook he tested the pull of the line and the bend of the willow. He laid his rod down now and went back to where the trunk of a small birch tree, dead for several years, lay on its side in the grove of birches that bordered the cedars by the stream. He rolled the log over and found several earthworms under it. They were not big. But they were red and lively and he put them in a flat round tin with holes punched in the top that had once held Copenhagen snuff. He put some dirt over them and rolled the log back. This was the third year he had found bait at this same place and he had always replaced the log so that it was as he had found it.
Nobody knows how big this creek is, he thought. It picks up an awful volume of water in that bad swamp up above. Now he looked up the creek and down it and up the hill to the hemlock forest where the camp was. Then he walked to where he had left the pole with the line and the hook and baited the hook carefully and spat on it for good luck. Holding the pole and the line with the baited hook in his right hand he walked very carefully and gently toward the bank of the narrow, heavy-flowing stream.
It was so narrow here that his willow pole would have spanned it and as he came close to the bank he heard the turbulent rush of the water. He stopped by the bank, out of sight of anything in the stream, and took two lead shot, split down one side, out of the tobacco pouch and bent them on the line about a foot above the hook, clinching them with his teeth.
He swung the hook on which the two worms curled out over the water and dropped it gently in so that it sank, swirling in the fast water, and he lowered the tip of the willow pole to let the current take the line and the baited hook under the bank. He felt the line straighten and a sudden heavy firmness. He swung up on the pole and it bent almost double in his hand. He felt the throbbing, jerking pull that did not yield as he pulled. Then it yielded, rising in the water with the line. There was a heavy wildness of movement in the narrow, deep current, and the trout was torn out of the water and, flopping in the air, sailed over Nick’s shoulder and onto the bank behind him. Nick saw him shine in the sun and then he found him where he was tumbling in the ferns. He was strong and heavy in Nick’s hands and he had a pleasant smell and Nick saw how dark his back was and how brilliant his spots were colored and how bright the edges of his fins were. They were white on the edge with a black line behind and then there was the lovely golden sunset color of his belly. Nick held him in his right hand and he could just reach around him.
He’s pretty big for the skillet, he thought. But I’ve hurt him and I have to kill him.
He knocked the trout’s head sharply against the handle of his hunting knife and laid him against the trunk of a birch tree.
“Damn,” he said. “He’s a perfect size for Mrs. Packard and her trout dinners. But he’s pretty big for Littless and me.”
I better go upstream and find a shallow and try to get a couple of small ones, he thought. Damn, didn’t he feel like something when I horsed him out though? They can talk all they want about playing them but people that have never horsed them out don’t know what they can make you feel. What if it only lasts that long? It’s the time when there’s no give at all and then they start to come and what they do to you on the way up and into the air.
This is a strange creek, he thought. It’s funny when you have to hunt for small ones.
He found his pole where he had thrown it. The hook was bent and he straightened it. Then he picked up the heavy fish and started up the stream.
There’s one shallow, pebbly part just after she comes out of the upper swamp, he thought. I can get a couple of small ones there. Littless might not like this big one. If she gets homesick I’ll have to take her back. I wonder what those old boys are doing now? I don’t think that goddamn Evans kid knows about this place. That son of a bitch. I don’t think anybody fished in here but Indians. You should have been an Indian, he thought. It would have saved you a lot of trouble.
He made his way up the creek, keeping back from the stream but once stepping onto a piece of bank where the stream flowed underground. A big trout broke out in a violence that made a slashing wake in the water. He was a trout so big that it hardly seemed he could turn in the stream.
“When did you come up?” Nick said when the fish had gone under the bank again further upstream. “Boy, what a trout.”
At the pebbly shallow stretch he caught two small trout. They were beautiful fish, too, firm and hard and he gutted the three fish and tossed the guts into the stream, then washed the trout carefully in the cold water and then wrapped them in a small faded sugar sack from his pocket.
It’s a good thing that girl likes fish, he thought. I wish we could have picked some berries. I know where I can always get some, though. He started back up the hill slope toward their camp. The sun was down behind the hill and the weather was good. He looked out across the swamp and up in the sky, above where the arm of the lake would be, he saw a fish hawk flying.
He came up to the lean-to very quietly and his sister did not hear him. She was lying on her side, reading. Seeing her, he spoke softly not to startle her.
“What did you do, you monkey?”
She turned and looked at him and smiled and shook her head.
“I cut it off,” she said.
“How?”
“With a scissors. How did you think?”
“How did you see to do it?”
“I just held it out and cut it. It’s easy. Do I look like a boy?”
“Like a wild boy of Borneo.”
“I couldn’t cut it like a Sunday-school boy. Does it look too wild?”
“No.”
“It’s very exciting,” she said. “Now I’m your sister but I’m a boy, too. Do you think it will change me into a boy?”
“No.”
“I wish it would.”
“You’re crazy, Littless.”
“Maybe I am. Do I look like an idiot boy?”
“A little.”
“You can make it neater. You can see to cut it with a comb.”
“I’ll have to make it a little better but not much. Are you hungry, idiot brother?”
“Can’t I just be an un-uliot brother?”
“I don’t want to trade you for a brother.”
“You have to now, Nickie, don’t you see? It was something we had to do. I should have asked you but I knew it was something we had to do so I did it for a surprise.”
“I like it,” Nick said. “The hell with everything. I like it very much.”
“Thank you, Nickie, so much. I was laying trying to rest like you said. But all I could
do was imagine things to do for you. I was going to get you a chewing tobacco can full of knockout drops from some big saloon in someplace like Sheboygan.”
“Who did you get them from?”
Nick was sitting down now and his sister sat on his lap and held her arms around his neck and rubbed her cropped head against his cheek.
“I got them from the Queen of the Whores,” she said. “And you know the name of the saloon?”
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