When Cane woke up, the morning sky was overcast with gray clouds, and he was damp with drizzle and shivering with the cold. For the first time in his life, he was truly alone. He raised up on his elbows to take a look around, and as he did so, he felt more blood gush out of the bullet hole. Easing himself back down, he felt in his pockets and found his last cigar and some matches. He drew on it several times, hoping it might warm him, but then he started coughing, and stabbed it out on a wet leaf. For several minutes, he watched a cardinal hop from branch to branch, just a foot or so away from him, and then fly away.
As the drizzle became a rain, Cane drifted off again. He found himself in a house that seemed familiar, as if he had lived there for a long, long time. He was sitting in a chair by a fireplace reading a book, and from what he could tell, he was near the end of it. The smell of freshly baked bread and flowers wafted in the warm air, and through the curtained windows he could see that it was dark outside. Suddenly, a beautiful, dark-haired woman appeared in the room and started to walk by him, her dress rustling against her pale skin. Her hand reached out and lightly touched his shoulder; and he felt more at peace right then than he’d ever felt in his life. Then she paused at a stairway and looked back; and the last thing he heard as he turned another page was her wishing him good night.
Epilogue
AFTER JASPER SHOWED up at their house with Cob one night in a rented carriage, the Fiddlers hid him in Eddie’s old room and then spent the entire winter trying to invent a convincing explanation as to who he was and why he was staying with them. They must have told each other a hundred different lies before they finally settled on one they thought might work. Then they went over that lie a hundred more times before Eula felt that Ellsworth was ready to tell it to someone, and in the end, they decided that that someone would be Parker. They figured with the way the storekeeper liked to spread gossip, all they had to do was get him to believe it, and within a week or two everyone in the township would.
And so one bright morning in the early spring of 1918, Ellsworth took Cob, along with a few sips of wine in a jar to give him courage, over to Nipgen to plant the seed. As they pulled the wagon into the lot, he patted the boy on the knee and reminded him again, “Just let me do the talking.” When they entered the store, he saw to his relief that no one else was there. So far, so good, Ellsworth thought to himself, but when Parker suddenly raised up from behind the counter, he panicked, forgetting all about Eula’s warning to just act normal, and before the storekeeper could even get a good look at who he was talking about, he’d finished the story about Junior without taking a single breath and ordered a pound of coffee, and then they were out the door.
Fortunately, though Parker did wonder a little why Ellsworth had seemed so nervous, he didn’t suspect anything was amiss, at least not at first. He’d seen the farmer shook up before over stuff that most men wouldn’t think twice about. Why, the Singletons could get him going with a mere smirk. And things such as what he’d described, well, they happened all the time. He sucked on a piece of hard candy while he thought it over, reworking the details a bit to give it a little more color, and by evening the storekeeper had told the story in various renditions to twenty or more customers. He was still revising it in his head when Dean Hartley came in right at closing time stinking of home brew and mumbled that he wanted a pound of salt fish.
Parker reached under the counter for a sheet of the old newspapers he saved back to wrap parcels in, and spread it on the counter. Then he took the lid off the barrel of cod and pulled four or five out. As he laid them on the scale tray, he glanced down at the paper and saw the faded drawings of the three outlaws that had caused so much commotion last fall. “Well, shit, that looks just like—” he started to say, but then stopped.
“Huh?” Hartley grunted.