Bobby got up and listened too. Okay, he said. So once more they crouched together against the dirt embankment within its shade, waiting for the train. There was a grasshopper on the weeds, watching them, chewing its mouth. Ike threw a piece of dirt at it and it hopped onto the track. The train came on from a distance, whistling sudden and long at a mile crossing. They waited. The coins and her bracelet were out on the track. After a time they could see the train, dark-looming in the haze. It came on and got louder, bigger, and appeared as terrific as if it were dreamed, shaking the ground, the grasshopper still watching the two boys, and then the train was on them. They looked at the man standing high above inside the roaring locomotive and dirt was flying everywhere in the air in a white gale so sudden and violent that they had to protect their eyes, then its long string of freight cars was rushing past, clattering and squealing, whistling, a loose rattling clacking noise, the joint in the iron rail before them dipping as the wheels passed, carrying the weight, and then it was gone and the man in the caboose looked back at them and they stared back, not waving. When the train was far down the tracks they rose and picked up the coins and her bracelet.
In the shade of the cutbank they squatted and inspected what they had now. The coins were misshapen oval disks, the profiled heads of the presidents like ghostly shadows, bright, shiny, out-of-round. The faces in outline only, no depth or texture, no dimension. Her bracelet was flattened the same, thin as paper, they could break it. They turned the coins over in their hands and regarded the bracelet, and after a while they poked a hole in the dirt and buried the four coins together with their mother’s bracelet in the dirt under the sheered bank and put a rock over the place.
You going to want to smoke again? Ike said.
Yes.
All right.
He got out two more of the cigarettes from his shirt pocket and together they sat smoking fifteen feet back from the tracks in the shade. They watched out into the sun on the trackbed and neither talked nor moved for some time.
McPherons.
When they came up to the house from the horse barn in the afternoon near the end of the month they saw there was a black car parked at the gate in front of the house. They didn’t recognize it.
Who’s that?
Nobody I know, Harold said.
The car had a Denver license plate. They went on around it and up the walk onto the porch. Inside the house they found him sitting at the walnut table in the dining room seated across from the girl. She was holding the baby. He was a tall thin young man and he didn’t get up when they came in.
I come back to take her with me, he said. And the baby too. My daughter.
So that’s who you are, Harold said.
He and the old McPheron brothers looked at one another.
You don’t stand up when somebody enters the room in his own house, Harold said.
Not usually, no, the boy said.
This is Dwayne, the girl said.
I reckoned it must be. What do you want here?
I told you, he said. I come back for what belongs to me. Her and the baby too.
I’m not going though, the girl said.
Yeah, he said. You are.
Do you want to go, Victoria? Raymond said.
No. I’m not going. I told him. I’m not leaving here.
Oh yeah, she’s coming. She’s just playing hard to get. She just wants to be coaxed.
No, I don’t. That’s not it.
Son, Harold said. I reckon you better leave. Nobody wants you here. Victoria’s made that pretty clear. And Raymond and me damn sure don’t have any use for you.
I’ll leave when she gets ready, the boy said. Go on, he said to the girl. Go get your stuff together.
No.
Go on, like I told you.
I’m not going.
Son. Are you kind of hard of hearing? You heard her and now you heard me.
And you heard me, the boy said. Goddamn it, he said to the girl, go on now. Get your things. Hurry up.
No.
The boy jumped up and started around the table and grabbed her by the arm. He pulled her up out of the chair.
Goddamn it, do it. Like I been telling you. Now move.
The two brothers came around the table toward him.
Son. Now you leave her alone. Let go of her.
The boy jerked her arm. The baby fell to the floor and was shocked and began to wail. And she jerked loose and squatted to pick her up. The baby was crying wildly.
I’m sorry, he said. I didn’t mean that. Just come on. She’s mine too.
No, the girl cried. I’m not going. We’re not going.
That’s enough, Harold said. That’ll do. The brothers took him by the arms and he started to fight them, and they lifted him off his feet, squirming and twisting and caterwauling, and carried him out the door, and they were hard and determined and stronger than he was, and they took him outside down the steps through the yard gate.
Let go of me.
On the gravel drive they released him.
The boy looked at them. All right, he said. I’m going, for now.
Don’t come back.
You haven’t heard the last of me, he said.