55
After dinner the boy got into his jacket and went down the porch steps and out onto the April snowfall. He headed for the barn, stepping again and again into his own blue shadow, until abruptly he stopped and looked up and saw the full moon burning overhead. For all its wintry sharpness the night smelled of the thaw the snow had covered, of loam and grass and pitch. As he neared the barn he smelled the hay bale he’d busted open earlier, and he smelled the horses and the saddles, odors as pungent as they’d be on a hot day in the summer. The mares stretched their necks and snorted as he unpocketed an apple and held it out to be smacked up by one mare and then he did the same for the other. They snuffed up the apple scent from his palm and, finding only scent, permitted him to stroke the warm ridge of bone from forehead to muzzle. On the rail before the tack wall sat the two saddles, and he put his hand on the seat of one, feeling along the smooth cool curve of it.
He’d seen her just once, since: dark-haired and pretty in her black dress at the old man’s funeral . . . looking up to find her looking at him. But that was not the time to talk to her, that was not the time, and what did it matter anyway?
When he got back to the house, his father had broomed off the porch steps and was sitting on the top step, smoking a cigarette. The boy sat beside him and took one of his cigarettes and leaned toward the offered flame.
“You ever look at that old man’s throat?” his father said.
“Yeah, I looked at it.”
“But it made no impression.”
“It made an impression.” He drew on his cigarette. “I’ll quit when you quit.”
Grant looked at him and looked away. “All right.”
One of the mares whinnied and stamped in her stall.
“They’re going to miss you,” Grant said.
“Who?” said the boy. Flicking his ash.
“Those horses. Who did you think I meant?”
The boy shrugged. “Thought you meant the horses.”
“Then why’d you ask who?”
The boy said nothing. They smoked.
“Maybe we should make an offer,” Grant said. “Take them with us. The horses, I mean.”
“Take them where?”
Grant lifted his cigarette and drew on it. Across the blue clearing sat the old man’s house, dark and silent. There was no wind or movement or sound anywhere. The El Camino had been gone all day.
“You think he’s coming back?” said the boy.
Grant straightened his arm to tip his ash. “It doesn’t much matter now, does it?”
“It never did,” said the boy. “Not to me.”
Grant looked at him in his wrist cast, looking up at the moon. The moon in the very middle of the sky, in the black bowl of stars shaped by the snowy ridgelines all around, the ridgelines themselves bright and stark and close in the moonlight.
“It’s going to snow again,” Grant said.
The boy scanned the sky. “There’s not a cloud in a hundred miles.”
“That’s a halo moon.”
“So?”
“So that means more snow.”
“Says who?”
“Says everybody.”
The boy glanced at him. “You were watching the news,” he said, and Grant nodded.
“It’s snowing in the mountains and headed this way.” He pointed his cigarette at the moon. “But anybody can see that.”
The boy shook his head.
To the north above the ridgeline a falling star burned and died, leaving a faint scratch on the black lens of sky.
Did you make a wish, Daddy?
Yes I did. Did you?
Yes.
Shoulder to shoulder in summer’s grass, a concert of summer’s insects in their ears. The dizzying, burning heavens.
How many stars are there, Daddy?
Too many to count, Caitydid.
Will they all fall?
No, just a few.
Where do they go when they fall?
I don’t know. Where do you think?
“Did you see that?” he said to his son.
“What?”
“Falling star.”
“It wasn’t a falling star.”
“Sure it was.”
“Stars don’t fall. It was space debris. A piece of rock.”
Grant looked at him.
“What?” said the boy.
Grant looked to the north again. As if where one star fell there would be another.
The boy drew on his cigarette and surveyed the sky all around. “See that little group of stars there, just above the ridgeline?” He was pointing to the southwest.
Grant shook his head.
“Right under Cancer?”
Grant looked at him.
“That little cluster,” the boy said, “right there, above that high point of trees?”
“All right,” said Grant. “I see it.”
“That’s Hydra, the water snake. Its head, anyway. Longest constellation in the sky. It was charted by the Greeks over two thousand years ago, and guess what?”
“What?”
“Not one star has ever fallen out of it.”
Grant nodded. “What else?” he said.
The boy told him that Hercules had fought the water snake as one of his twelve labors, that the snake had many heads and each time Hercules chopped off one head, two grew back. Grant asked how Hercules solved this problem and the boy told him that each time he chopped off a head, his nephew came along with a hot sword to burn the stump.
They were quiet, each looking up, as if watching such things unfold. The boy turned to the north and pointed again. “See those five stars up there? Looks like an upside-down house?”
“Sure,” said Grant.
“That’s Cepheus, the king.”
“What’d he do?”
“He had a wife who bragged about her beauty so much Neptune sent a sea monster to destroy his kingdom.”
“Did it?”
“What?”
“Destroy his kingdom.”
“No. As a sacrifice to the sea monster the king chained his only daughter to a rock by the sea.” The boy tipped his ash.
Grant sat studying the distant lights. Distant cold debris field of falling objects and her hand so warm, so small in his, her grip so strong.
I think they turn into little children, she said.
Like you?
No. Little children who don’t live in houses. And who know magic. And who no one can see but God.
Are they angels?
No, Daddy, I told you. They’re just little children.