Toby bent over, retching. He clawed violently at the branches, slowly circling the place, trying not to look at the shattered head. He knew it was Jacob Brent, the grandfather of his friend David. They had killed him, but surely he had never harmed anyone, never threatened the bikers.
It was horrible. Toby struggled forward, beating back the branches, trying to reach a clear space. Then, as he turned to run away, he tripped over the second body: a woman, shot through the chest, bound roughly with half-rotten rope to the stump of an old pine. Her face was white, waxen, grotesque. She was clearly dead. Toby did not know who she was.
For a few moments the boy stood there, overcome by the terrifying stillness that surrounded the place. Then, with a start, he realized that the dog was barking furiously close by, that a fresh breeze had stirred up the branches, that his own heart was beating wildly, though the bodies lay in a silence nothing human could break.
It was what his father had wished to spare him: this vision of the unburied dead; this violation of the flesh. The boy, overcome by deep sadness, went mechanically forward.
He wandered dazedly out on the path. With its deep-scored ruts, it ran like a raw strip up into the trees. The earth seemed to crumble beneath him; here, tires had flung stray pebbles and sheered off thick clods of caked earth. Plunged deep in the soft green bank was his father’s best shovel.
From behind, all at once, something leapt. Startled, Toby grabbed and held Ranger, and the dog rubbed its nose on his cheek. He kept jumping against Toby and barking.
Talby’s voice called out his son’s name.
Fifty feet up the trail, Toby saw the old man, crouched down among a small stand of birch trees. Some of the branches had been hacked at and snapped off; they tapered down around Talby like the bars of a cage. He bent over, pressing his eyes with his hands, moaning softly.
Toby ran forward. His father stretched out awkwardly to embrace him. His eyes, slits of pain, oozed flecks of white foam. Toby kicked away a prisoning branch and clung hard to his father, who straightened up, revealing his torn clothes and bruised cheeks and forehead. The boy hugged him close.
“I’m blind,” said the old man. “They’ve blinded me.”
He wrenched himself away, brushing at his eyelids with his stubby gnarled fingers. A grey-white foam ran in the hollows underneath his eyes; he blinked helplessly.
“Quick, Father!” Toby felt the tears scald his own eyes as he pulled the old man along the path. The dog criss-crossed wildly ahead of them. Toby half-dragged, half-coaxed his father up the sharp slope to where a clear stream bubbled out from the rocks.
“Bend over!” the boy commanded, pressing his father down close to the stream. Cupping the water in his hands, he splashed a rough handful in the old man’s squinting eyes. Talby cried out in protest, sputtering and wheezing, and rubbing his eyes all the harder.
“Don’t do that!” the boy cried, and scooped up the water all the faster. Ranger jumped up and down beside them, barking loudly and catching the splashed water with his tongue. The old man sat blinking, drenched, his hands moving restlessly at his side. The boy hurled more and more water in the old man’s face.
“Enough!” cried the old man at last. He sat there, his torn grey worksuit soaked through, his eyes blinking, clear of the foam, flashing grey.
Toby reached out and gently touched his father’s eyes, as if trying to make them focus on him, but they looked somewhere beyond, their clear, grey intensity blurred.
“They’ve blinded me. Shot some foul stuff in my eyes,” the old man said, in a harsh, trembling voice. “Now who will bury the dead?” He bowed his head, seeming to retreat into his own misery.
Toby would not believe it. He jumped up, crying, “No! No!” and began hurling stones at the trees. “You’ve got to see, Father. You’ve got to!” His sobs broke the clear air; the dog whined at his heels.
But after a few minutes the boy felt the anger go out of him. He looked down at his father, whose glance failed to meet his. Then Toby felt a great weight on his shoulders, something pressing the breath and the life from his body. Slowly, he sank down on the turf where his father sat mumbling, still wrapped in his own thoughts.
“It was the Reardons that did it,” his father said. “They care nothing for the old laws.”
“I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them if it’s the last thing I do,” the boy said, and his voice cracked with passion, his hands making impotent fists at his side.
Talby took hold of his son’s arm. “Come,” he said softly. “You must help me get home.”
CHAPTER FOUR
They walked up through the woods, the boy leading the way, holding tight to his father’s wet sleeve. Toby balanced the old man’s shovel on one shoulder. There was no sound of intruders, no machines, though the birds started up in quick bursts as the two of them trudged by. Easing the old man through the pines, around damp rotted stumps, past glazed, mossy boulders that lay across the path, Toby led the way back. He said nothing about the two corpses he had stumbled on just before finding his father, but when they drew near the place of the murder, he saw how old Talby paused for a moment, turning his sightless eyes on the bodies, as if some deep instinct in his soul had made him aware of them.
The home clearing was quiet; smoke rising from the cabin. While Toby groped at the door, his father stood by helplessly.
“Am I never to see my house again?” he asked in a trembling voice.
The boy helped his father into the low bunk bed near the fireplace. Quickly, he boiled water, threw in some tea, let it cool. Then, taking great care, he used clean cloths to bathe the old man’s eyes.
“It’s no good,” Talby said, “I can’t see.” And he lay back groaning on the bunk.
Mechanically, Toby went about making supper for them both. After a while Talby ceased to complain and lay quietly staring up at the roof. Toby did not know what to say to him. There was a terrible anger in his heart; he wanted revenge, to strike out at those who had done this to his father. Every time the boy slipped out of the cabin — to fetch wood, or to look around the clearing with an anxious, nervous glance — his father’s voice pursued him. “Don’t leave me alone, Toby. Don’t leave me alone now.”
Toby sat beside his father, took hold of one of the old man’s gnarled hands, and attempted to distract him. “I don’t know what to do, Father. Tell me what to do. I don’t understand anything. You told me once you would explain everything. You would tell me about how this awful world happened.”
Talby groaned, and for long minutes he was silent. “I can’t face it, Son.” He said at last. “What’s the use of talking about those evil days?”
“You said you’d tell me when I was of age,” Toby cried. “‘All the Old Believers pass on the word,’ you said. Remember that? Now I have to try to be of age whether I am or not. You’ve got to help me understand.”
His father groaned again; he started to sit up, then collapsed back on his bunk. After a few minutes, however, he began to speak.
“There’s a trunk by the bed here. It contains some of your mother’s special clothes and things, you know that. But there’s a smaller box inside it. The key for that’s hung up there behind the clock. Fetch me the key now, Son. You’re right — it’s time to pass on the scripture copy, the commission, to you, to set you on the path. It wasn’t supposed to be until you were twenty-one, but that’s all changed now.”
Toby opened the large chest — which wasn’t locked — rummaged through the piles of clothes, old slippers, sweaters, and gloves, and at the bottom found a wooden box, about the size of a briefcase. He handed the box to his father and fetched