Then Ranger would press in and lick the boy’s hand for a crust, and Toby would toss away the soggy bread and watch the dog scramble after it, sometimes knocking down his father’s carefully propped-up row of shovels, picks, and spades, shaking the bottles and making a terrible clatter in the small cabin room.
Among the seasons, to which he was very close, Toby liked autumn the best, even though it meant he had to go back to school. He didn’t mind sitting all day in the big schoolroom at Carson’s Corners, though he shrank from the whispering and pointing. He hated how his classmates seemed to notice every frayed edge and patch on his clothes (although his father took them for repair from time to time to the widow Marston). Above all, he hated the way they made fun of his father, how they imitated his shuffling, bent walk, or screamed with sharp laughter when they mimicked the old man’s way with a shovel or a pick.
Why did his father have to be so old, with a long, ragged beard that trailed down almost to his belt buckle? Why did he have to wear the same faded grey work clothes, the same shabby coats, and a cap that was worse than the battered headgear of old Top Hat, the crazy black man who lived in the hills?
Worst of all, why was he the one who had to bury the dead? Why couldn’t he plant corn or potatoes like the rest of the farmers, instead of digging in hidden places and laying to rest the poor creatures of God’s earth: the killed, spoiled deer, the slaughtered hawks and wild geese, even the groundhogs, not to mention the travellers or passers-by — mutants mostly — who had the misfortune to starve in the woods, or who had been shot by the hunters or run down by the Reardon gang because they got in the way during one of the motorcycle races?
“Crazy Talby,” the children and young folk whispered, and sometimes shouted, and Toby would think of the name when he watched his father some mornings, bent over the stove, where he always made the same hard, flat pancakes for breakfast, scraping them carefully from the skillet, and spooning out three, always three, for Toby, while the coffee settled down and the milk boiled up right beside it.
Father and son would sit opposite each other at the small table and Toby would stare down at the worn, shiny oilcloth while Talby said grace with elaborate and resonant piety. And Toby would sometimes look up, fascinated by his father’s hoarse voice, by the way his beard flowed down in the honey bowl, by the stray tufts of hair at the old man’s wrists and nostrils.
Only rarely would the boy take courage to look straight into his father’s deep-sunken watery grey eyes, yet when he did, those eyes would hold him for long seconds with a mildness and innocence he could hardly name but felt steadily, like a pleasing gentle pressure, in his chest and stomach.
And on those autumn mornings when the leaves were just turning gold or russet, Toby would be awakened by the sound of the hunters’ guns, the clear, faintly echoing crack crack crack tossing him round on his bunk. He would start up, cloaked in shadows, and see that his father had already gone. And once or twice the boy crept out, before his father returned to make breakfast, and watched in the woods, and saw the hunters. His father had told him the story of Nimrod from the Bible, but these were only men from a nearby village: storekeepers and handy-men who walked stiffly, warily, despite their neon orange hats and store-bought guns. With faces frozen and eyes glazed, they stopped now and then to pass a small flask from hand to hand, peering anxiously around them, and holding hard to their weapons, as if their bodies had gone rigid in a state between fear and desire.
The bikers were different. They would come roaring up the trails, hacking at the trees with hatchets and long knives, firing their shotguns at random, four or five at once rolling a captured girl underneath the maples, sometimes dumping a victim in the under-brush, a mutant whose face had been blasted away, a farmer who had taken pity on one of the fugitives.
This had gone on for as long as Toby could remember, although his father once told him it had started after the war (the war against terror, the eternal war), and now continued uncontrolled, at least in the country. And the boy knew that the bikers both hated and respected his father — hating him, as the hunters did, because he cared for what they tried to destroy, and respecting him, despite themselves, because he was not afraid.
But sometimes the boy was afraid, because he knew in his heart that things could not go on in the same way forever. Once or twice the bikers had come to the shack and smashed all the windows and thrown a corpse into the well, and the hunters had tried to shoot Ranger. There were swastikas painted on the last of the sheds, and once a goat with its throat slit was nailed up to the cabin door. So when the attack finally came, it was something expected, like a storm seen unfolding across a broad placid valley.
CHAPTER THREE
On a clear day late in spring, during one of the last six weeks of school, while Toby was sitting dreaming in one of Froats’s apple trees, chopping at a grey, brittle branch with his jackknife, he heard the roar of the motorcycles.
Within minutes two riders appeared, cutting deep tracks in the soft road. Toby shrank back.
It was Mal and Whit Reardon, the oldest of the brothers, burly riders in black leather and jackboots — Mal with a shining bald head and a shotgun strapped to his back, Whit in a fur vest-coat, and wearing the green-tinted goggles that, even at some distance, gave his eyes a cold, snaky cast.
While Toby held his breath, the two riders stopped in the road just opposite the orchard. They rocked to and fro on their Harleys, gunning their engines, the sharp rasping sounds like snarls of anxious irritation. Leaning their heads close, they exchanged a few words, then glanced once or twice in his direction. Toby thought he saw them smiling, and half-expected them to come roaring across the field after him. Suddenly, they did move, but wheeled away down the road and soon disappeared behind a line of trees.
The boy slid slowly down the grey, twisted trunk. Had he mistaken their look? Had the riders come there to find him, to make sure of where he was? But to what purpose?
In a sudden panic, Toby looked around. The main path to the homestead lay behind him, twisting up through the new sprouting brush, through the maples and birch, to the clearing. But there were other paths, and beside one of them his father was surely at work. He and Toby had heard the bikers riding all night, and there had been gunfire and shouting and low moaning cries until dawn.
Toby started to run. He dodged through the trees, leapt a ditch, crossed a small scrubby field, and bounded away up the narrow track, breathing hard as he jumped over loose stones and small trenches gouged out by the spring rain.
The familiar woods and its features flowed past his eyes like pictures on a moving screen: there was the pool, spilling water; the ancient split rock; the ash tree, still thin-leafed and bare; the lone tamarack.
Out of breath, he burst into the clearing and stopped short. The cabin lay peaceful, untouched. A thin thread of smoke rose from the chimney; swallows wheeled out of the shed. The woods were almost silent, except for a thin, distant buzzing of bikes muffled down to a faint, bee-like hum.
“Ranger?” the boy called in a tentative voice
He walked slowly up to the cabin and entered. He felt, as always, the sense of a quiet sanctuary within, everything in its place, and the fire lit. The dog, though, was nowhere in sight.
Outside, the boy raised his voice in a series of calls; then he listened, half-expecting to hear the patient, steady thrust of his father’s shovel at work in the nearby woods, afraid that the silence might explode with the roar of machinery.
He called at the top of his voice, and at last heard a faint bark. Within minutes he was tracking the sound, beating down through the stiff underbrush that lay to the north of the homestead. There were a few trails there where the bikers, on certain nights, ran their quarry. Mal and Whit Reardon, he knew, could have circled and entered the woods from the road on the other side.
Toby pushed on, his glazed eyes steady. Nonetheless, he felt fear at the bone. Then the dog barked, not far off.
Toby