- Why doesn't he look like before, Daddy? Why -
- Because the bad-gunky's gone, you numbskull. And here's an irony even a badly shaken ten-year-old can appreciate, at least a bright one like Scott: now that Paul lies dead, chained to a post in the cellar with his brains blown out, Daddy has never looked or sounded saner. And if anyone else sees him like this, I'll be for either the state prison in Waynesburg or locked in that smucking nutbarn up Reedville. That's if they don't lynch me first. We'll have to bury him, although aint it gonna be a bitch-kitty with the ground like it is, hard as arn.
Scott says, - I'll take him, Daddy.
- How you gonna take him? You couldn't take him when he was alive!
He doesn't have the language to explain that now it will be no more than going there dressed in his clothes, which he always does. That anvil-weight, bank-vault weight, piano-weight, is gone from the thing chained to the post; the thing chained to the post is now no more than the green husk you strip off an ear of corn. Scott just says, - I can do it now.
- You're a little bag of boast and wind, Daddy says, but he leans the deer-gun against the table with the printing-press on it. He runs a hand through his hair and sighs. For the first time he looks to Scott like a man who could get old.
- Go on, Scott, might as well give her a try. Can't hurt.
But now that there's no actual danger, Scott is bashful.
- Turn around, Daddy.
- WHAT the FUCK you say?
There's a potential beating in Daddy's voice, but for once Scott doesn't back down. It isn't the going part that bothers him; he doesn't care if Daddy sees that. What he's bashful about is Daddy seeing him take his dead brother in his arms. He's going to cry. He feels it coming on already, like rain on a late spring afternoon, when the day has been hot with a foretaste of summer.
- Please, he says in his most placating voice. Please, Daddy. For a moment Scott is quite sure that his father is going to rush across the cellar to where his surviving son stands, with his tripled shadow racing beside him on the rock walls, and backhand him - perhaps knock him spang into his big brother's dead lap. He's been backhanded plenty of times and usually even the thought of it makes him cringe, but now he stands straight between Paul's splayed legs, looking into his father's eyes. It's hard to do that, but he manages. Because they have survived a terrible passage together, and will have to keep it between themselves forever: Shhhhhh. So he deserves to ask, and he deserves to look in Daddy's eyes while he waits for his answer. Daddy doesn't come at him. Instead he takes a deep breath, blows it out, and turns around. - You'll be tellin me when to warsh the floors and scrub out the tawlit next, I guess, he grumbles. I'll give you a count of thirty, Scoot 21
"I'll give you a count of thirty and then I'm turning around again," Scott tells her. "I'm pretty sure that's how he finished it, but I never heard because by then I was gone off the face of the earth. Paul too, right out of his chains. I took him with me as easy as ever once he was dead; maybe easier. I bet Daddy never finished counting to thirty. Hell, I bet he never even got started before he heard the clink of chains or maybe the sound of air rushing in to fill the place where we'd been and he turned around and he saw he had the cellar all to himself." Scott has relaxed against her; the sweat on his face and arms and body is drying. He has told it, gotten the worst of it out of him, sicked it up.
"The sound," she says. "I wondered about that, you know. If there was a sound under the willow tree when we...you know...came back out."
"When we boomed."
"Yes, when we...that."
"When we boomed, Lisey. Say it."
"When we boomed." Wondering if she's crazy. Wondering if he is, and if it's catching. Now he does light another cigarette, and in the matchglow his face is honestly curious.
"What did you see, Lisey? Do you remember?"
Doubtfully, she says: "There was a lot of purple, slanting down a hill...and I had a sense of shade, like there were trees right behind us, but it was all so quick...no more than a second or two..."
He laughs and gives her a one-armed hug. "That's Sweetheart Hill you're talking about."
"Sweetheart - ?"
"Paul named it that. There's dirt all around those trees - soft, deep, I don't think it's ever winter there - and that's where I buried him. That's where I buried my brother." He looks at her solemnly and says, "Do you want to go see, Lisey?"
22
Lisey had been asleep on the study floor in spite of the pain -
No. She hadn't been asleep, because you couldn't sleep with pain like this. Not without medical help. So what had she been?