Little Deaths

THE SKY WAS PALING IN THE EAST,but it was still dark on the porch of the Perlite farmhouse. Ragged limestone cliffs rose to either side, blocking the winter light from the bottom land, pinched in a fold between two steep ridges. It was cold--Rose Ella Perlite was cold-- she’d waited inside for half an hour, rather than sit near the stove while her mother implied “I told you so” with every thrust and jerk of her darning needle. “You said be ready before dawn,” Rose Ella told Tom Hardin Stoneman when finally he pulled up in his truck.

“So what’s time to a hog,” he said. He leaned across the seat, opened her door from the inside.

Not a promising beginning for a first date, but then she couldn’t say she hadn’t been warned--her mother had done nothing but warn these past few days. Without all that warning, Rose Ella would most likely have stood him up.

“Patch,” he said, jerking his head to the rear. She thought this was a command, some obscure man-talk, until she turned around and saw in the truck bed a wire-haired mongrel, somewhat bigger than a breadbox, dirty white except for a black eyespot that gave him the air of a canine pirate. He shot her a look of lascivious familiarity. “That dog knows me from somewhere,” she said.

Tom Hardin started the truck. “He gets around.”

He was trapping furs for the high-toned buyers from New York and he’d asked right out on the courthouse square if she wanted to help him run traps. They’d known each other exactly five minutes when he’d asked, she with all of her girlfriends standing right there knowing perfectly well that she was already promised to Camp Junior. Who was more dumbfounded--she when he asked, he when she said yes? Either way here they were, speeding down the winding road, Tom Hardin with one hand on the wheel, the other rooting under the seat.

He was the first man she’d met who hadn’t fallen all over her. That was partly why she was here; she’d said as much to her mother. Rose Ella was mystified by this phenomenon--these great lunks pursuing her with offers for dates--but she’d come to accept this as her gift, the way some people came by rhythm or perfect pitch or (in the case of Tom Hardin) a smart mouth. It was a gift that until now she’d taken for granted--she’d realized that for the first time this morning, as she’d stood in the cold waiting for this stone, this Tom Hardin.

Bouncing and jostling over the uneven pavement, Rose Ella considered this: that men fell all over her because, unlike most girls, she was smart enough not to fall all over them. Certainly it wasn’t because she was flawlessly beautiful. She had these Clara Bow legs, it’s true, tapering to the most delicate of ankles, that last summer had scandalized the town when she’d worn a skirtless bathing suit to the river. But her chin was a little weak, and she had the kind of impressively full bust that in small women runs to pudge at the sight of ice cream.

She’d not much given a damn about men one way or another, so that when one came along who didn’t fall all over her, it gave her a chance to prove she was above all the whoop and holler. Anybody with any spirit would rise to that bait--she’d make the same choice tomorrow. For Rose Ella, it was the challenge of outwitting herself--Tom Hardin was just the means to that end.

He pulled a pint from under the seat, pulled the cork from the bottle with his teeth. He raised the bottle. “Us against them. Want a sip?”

“I don’t drink in the mornings.” She didn’t much drink at all, but that was the sort of revelation that might jeopardize a boy’s coming back, and she had been raised never to jeopardize the boy’s coming back. She was not in this game to jeopardize Tom Hardin’s coming back--she wanted him to come back (already this was her plan) so she could then turn him down.

“Suit yourself.” He took a long pull. “You spend enough time running traps, you’ll change your mind.”

“This is the first and last time you’ll catch me running traps,” she said, staring out the window. “And I’m not much given to changing my mind.”

Tom Hardin recorked the bottle and tossed it in her lap. “I bet you ain’t.”

On all sides the river was in winter flood. Three days of rain, then the rain had turned to falling ice before giving way to this morning’s gray dawn. The sun was not yet above the knobs, but already the half-light caught the ice-rimed branches, filling the trees with light until the meanest of them sparkled.

They turned into a graveled lane strewn with potholes, the headlights picking out barns and houses, dark gray against the silver sheet of the sky. “This road goes to Perlite Ford,” Rose Ella said. “My father’s family used to run a mill out there.”

“That’s right. Best trapping in the county. Never been out there that I hadn’t seen a fox. There’s a whole crew of ‘em, practically, as social as foxes ever get, that lives near the old mill. ‘Course, seeing one and trapping one’s a different matter. But still.” Tom Hardin slammed on the brakes at a culvert, causing the truck’s tail end to sashay a little over the gravel. “County says they’re paving this road, putting in a bridge. That’ll wreck hell with the trapping.”

They climbed from the truck. Tom Hardin pulled a trap from a large knapsack and set it on the truck’s tailgate. “This,” he said, “is a trap.”

Rose Ella was still a little shaken from the skid and more than a little angry at waiting half an hour in the cold--she was a Perlite, after all, even if they didn’t have a dime to their name. “Do tell,” she said. “I could have sworn it was a fishing pole.”

“Good to know you’re not above swearing. You’ll need it before this morning is out.”

I’ll be damned if I’ll give you the pleasure, Rose Ella thought. A Perlite woman was above that kind of blue-streak swearing, at least in front of a man. Already she was remonstrating with herself for having said yes. It was a small town, a small state, and she could tell anyone who bothered asking right now that news of her taking this trip, what she was wearing, what time she’d left, what time she got back--all this, embellished for the sake of dramatic effect, would make its way to Camp Junior at the university.

And now she was in it--she was here, five miles from home and probably one of her girlfriends was already telegraphing the word to Camp Junior, who stood to inherit money and who was headed for law school and who anybody, most especially her girlfriends, could see was a catch. There was no help for it now but to be as unpleasant as she could be to Tom Hardin--at least then nobody could accuse her of leading him on.

She ignored the trap to kneel in front of Patch, who had jumped from the truck bed. “Oh, you’re a sweetie,” she said. “Look at those big brown eyes--and that spot around your eye, makes you look dangerous. I’ll bet you’re a knockout with the girls.”

Tom Hardin made a noise of disgust. “No more than I can help. I want a dog, not a pet.” He laid the trap against the truck bed’s wooden planks, pried open its jaws. “Stick in your thumb. Go on. I just want you to feel the tension. It won’t cut your finger off. I hear that kind of thing all the time. ‘Oh, the poor animals,’ they say. Think about it. If a trap’d cut your finger off, it’d cut the mink’s leg off, and if it cut the mink’s leg off, it’d run away, and if the mink got away what good would that do? Hmm?”

“No good at all,” Rose Ella said. “For the mink.”

Tom Hardin gave her a sharp glance. “If you’re going to get all soapy about cute furry animals, just say so now, and you can take the truck back. I’ll run ‘em by myself.”

“Two days ago I had a flock of hens that I’d raised from when they were fuzzy little chicks. Last night we had fried chicken. Does that answer your question?” She took the trap by its chain and struck out down the path, swinging it like a yo-yo.

She was a good 50 yards from the truck before she realized Tom Hardin and Patch had crossed the road to the other side of the culvert. She retraced her steps, stood above him as he climbed down the bank and onto the creek-bed slate. “Culverts are best for trapping mink,” he said patiently, as if she’d been following attentively all along. “They stick to the water, and when they get to a culvert you can bet they ain’t going to go up and over it. Animals do things by habit, they’ll always do it the same way, you just size up the situation and figure out what that way is and then set your trap to take advantage of it.” He picked up a fallen branch the thickness of her wrist and snapped off one end. “This could come in handy.” He swung the stick like a baseball bat. “You get something you want that’s still kicking, you come up behind him, whack him over the head, that’s it, he’s dead. Never knows what hit him. You carry a gun in your pack in case you need it, but this is better--this way you get a clean pelt, no bullet holes, no cuts or blood.”

She watched Tom Hardin and Patch nosing about the culvert. Men, she thought. Arrogant sons of bitches, full of nothing but themselves and the only reason to choose one over another was if he had good looks, or money, or a way to get her where she wanted to go, which was as far away from this burg as the high road ran--preferably west, preferably to California, preferably to Hollywood. Camp Junior qualified for two out of three of these male requirements, and if he wasn’t much in the looks department, she shared her mother’s opinion that a law degree went far toward improving a man’s appearance. As for Tom Hardin, he wasn’t bad looking, she granted him that--his thick hair bristled as if maybe he and Patch shared some blood inheritance, but at least it wasn’t going to thin out and disappear like Camp Junior’s. Tom Hardin had a sureness of foot and a strength--the memory came, unbidden and unwanted, of the ease with which he broke that stick, and some buried part of her swelled and turned over like a lake. “Nothing but trouble down that road,” her mother had told her only yesterday. “ ‘A poor girl from the country, with only her wits and a fast-fading beauty to sustain her, must watch out to marry well.’ That’s my grandmother talking,” Rose Ella’s mother had said, “not 30 years off an English boat and bad enough married to know what she was talking about.”

Not that Rose Ella’s mother had married well--she’d married a Perlite, and however they might be the oldest family in the county and honest as dirt, they’d lost most of their money just in time to put what little was left into stocks right before the big crash. Marrying poor was not in the cards for her, Rose Ella had sworn this to herself before and she repeated it now.

Tom Hardin bent to the blue-black slate. His boots cracked the thin ice around the water’s edge and squelched in the mud. He held up a sprung trap. “Something could’ve sprung it. Or it could’ve sprung itself. That happens.” He reset the trap and climbed the bank.

They moved down the trail until Patch leapt ahead, splashed through the creek, dashed up the far bank. He ran back and forth on the other side, barking to raise the dead. Tom Hardin disappeared over the edge of the bank.

From the lip of the bank Rose Ella peered down. In the creek’s center a thin, dark shape floated under the surface. Tom Hardin gave a low, sharp whistle--Patch bounded over the slate, broke the crust of ice with his paws to seize the mink in his mouth and drag it to within Tom Hardin’s reach. “Hot damn!” Tom Hardin cried. He took the mink from Patch, pried open the trap jaws and waved the stiff body in the air. “Easy money come home! Here, hold this while I reset a trap.” He tossed the mink at her.

He lectured as he went about the task. “This is a drowning set. A mink’ll go straight for the water once he’s in trouble. He’ll do it every time. So you figure out the most direct path to the water. Maybe you find a little trough.” With the toe of his boot he scraped a groove in the creek bed. “Or if you’re real smart, maybe you make a little trough. You set your trap at the trough’s end and tie it to a wire that’s weighted down in the creek. As soon as the mink gets caught in the trap, he’ll drag it to the water, but then he gets tangled in the wire and the weight of the trap drowns him. A few minutes and you got the cleanest pelt there is, not so much as a scratch.”

She hefted the mink in her hand. She nearly dropped it, it was so light. Her thumb and forefinger fit around the thickest parts of its slick, black body. Its sharp teeth were bared in a frozen snarl and its dark eyes stared wide.

In her imagination, she had connected somehow Tom Hardin’s invitation to run traps with dropping a hint about what a nice present something made of fur would make for a girl. That was stupid, she was smarter than that, but then it wasn’t as if this was the first time she’d done things she’d been smart enough to know not to do. “What makes you think I want to hear all this about trapping?” she demanded, irritated with her own weakness.

“You came along, didn’t you?” He reset a trap, weighted it in the water, climbed the bank, took the mink from her and clipped its rear paw to his belt.

They walked in silence, Tom Hardin stopping every few yards to inspect the brush or the path, Rose Ella lost in the landscape. She loved this country in flood: the wide, flat expanse of muddy water, spreading almost to the feet of the knobby hills, filling sloughs and hollows, giving places she knew better than she knew herself a look of foreignness, as if this were another country that she was wandering through, she a traveling woman from some foreign land instead of plain old Rose Ella Perlite, who had picked blackberries in every one of these hollows and who knew the exact location of every generous-limbed hickory or black walnut in this end of the county.

And here she was with Tom Hardin, who dealt regularly with travelers from the most exotic places, which she could only imagine from her Saturday matinees at the Mary Anderson. Her curiosity got the better of the silent treatment--it was her weakness and she knew it, but if a girl was to go into the world she needed some idea of what she was getting into. “You have much truck with those buyers from New York?” she asked.

“As little as I can get away with.”

“Tell me what they look like.”

“Well, they’re short--”

“No, I don’t mean that. I mean, what kind of clothes they wear.”

“They wear minks,” Tom Hardin said. “Lots of minks. Think about how many minks it takes to make a knee-length coat. And then multiply that by a hundred, by a thousand, by ten thousand. That’s how many minks they wear. And two-tone shoes, look like they ran out of the right color halfway through.” He scratched his head. “That’s what sticks in my mind.”

“They come down here, they must think they’re visiting the back side of the moon.”

“They come down here to screw us over, and we turn up our tails and ask where. You come into the warehouse with a pile of fur, they cut the price by a third, what are you going to do? Throw it back in the creek? ‘Oh, Mr. Stoneman, but look at this bald patch.’ ‘Oh, Mr. Stoneman, fox is out this year, we can’t use that fox.’ It’s city folks against country folks and the deck stacked as usual. If fur was the only thing they wanted out of us, we’d be up shit creek without a paddle.”

“So what else do they want?”

“I’ll give you two guesses and the first two don’t count.” When she didn’t answer he pulled the whiskey from his knapsack. “How ‘bout a hint.”

“I told you I don’t drink in the morning.”

Tom Hardin squinted at the overcast sky. “Could be high noon, for all I can tell.” He took a long pull, recorked the bottle and tucked it away, moved on down the path.

“I’d love to go to New York,” she said, mostly to irritate him; judging from the movies she’d seen, California was more her kind of place.

“You’d last about as long as one of them would out here.”

“I’d last longer than you.”

“That I do not doubt.” He dropped to his knees. “I should have a fox set about here.” He peered around in the brush. “You’re damned lucky to get a fox, especially a red fox. They’re loners, and smart as they come. You save some piss from a fox you’ve killed and sprinkle that around to cover up your smell and attract the others.” He held up the trap. “Sprung, dammit. With a red fox, you have to set a whole new trap--they mark the ones they’ve sprung and won’t be a fox near it for a month.”

She handed him the trap she’d been carrying since leaving the truck. He took it, wrapped it in a rag, tucked it in his knapsack. “Covered with your smell. A fox’ll figure out that scent and follow it from one trap to the next. He’ll spring ever’ last one of ‘em and then piss on ‘em to rub your face in it. He’s a gambler, he’s got to do it, it’s in his blood. He’s probably running ahead of us right now, springing them one by one and laughing at us while he does it.” He took a fresh trap from the knapsack, set it in place, patted dirt around its edges, sprinkled it from a bottle he carried in the sack.

The wind picked up, scraping tree limbs together and rattling the red-orange bittersweet and dried brown milkweed pods. Above the wind’s sigh, from across the swollen river she heard a moan--something between the scream of a locomotive and the bellowing of cattle. Patch froze, hackles rising on his back, hind legs trembling. Rose Ella knew that sound, but Tom Hardin knew it faster. Already he had whipped a choke chain from his knapsack and fastened it around Patch’s neck. “At least this time I come prepared,” he said. He tossed her one end of the chain. “Hang on tight. Some city folks have moved in across the river with a whole pack of bitches, all of ‘em in heat as far as I can tell. Last time I was down here I had to use a chain from one of my traps to tie Patch to a tree just so I could finish my rounds, and even then by the time I got back he’d all but chewed the damn trunk through.”

“So what’s wrong with letting him run loose?” She waved at the churning brown stripe of water. “It’s not like he can jump across.”

“For a girl that claims she just shot a whole flock of chickens, you’re pretty damned ignorant.”

“Axed,” Rose Ella said.

“What’s that?”

“I didn’t shoot them, stupid. That’s for cowards. I chopped off their heads. Besides,” she said, mocking, “if you shot them, you’d fill all the meat with buckshot, and if you filled all the meat with buckshot, what good would that do? Hmm?” She tilted her head and pouted her lips in a half-grin of triumph. He turned away, but not before she caught the ripple of anger that tightened his jawline.

Tom Hardin walked down the path ( retreat , was how Rose Ella thought of it). “You don’t mess around with a river in flood,” Tom Hardin said. “You don’t mess around with love. Love is a flood,” he said. “It’s got to have its way. The weak and foolish it bowls over, the strong and smart hold out longer, but it grabs you by your roots and in the end it all comes to the same.”

“That’s not love.”

“Well, pardon me.” He turned around to face her. “You got a better name for it?” She blushed. “Go on, I’m interested.”

Anger triumphed over modesty. “That’s sex. Like two dogs rutting in the road.”

“And have you ever had sex, like two dogs rutting in the road?”

“I can’t believe I’m standing here listening to this.”

Now it was his turn to grin. “So keep walking, Miss Priss.” He moved down the path, thrashing at the broom sage and blackberry canes with his stick. “Your time will come.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because you’re a pretty woman and you want it to happen, and pretty women usually get what they want. Or hadn’t you noticed.”

“What a talker.”

“That’s OK. You just hold on to that dog.”

The clouds began to spit snow, and before they reached the next trap a fine white powder covered the path. Across the river the mournful howling rose and fell--Rose Ella thought of the coal freight that came through the valley, whose moaning whistle you could hear now more, now less distinctly as it passed across the wide-open flatness of a trestle or through a dense clump of trees. Patch strained at the leash, whining through clenched teeth. “If that wouldn’t drive you crazy,” she had to say aloud. “You’d think they’d breed them or spay them, one.”

“They’re from Louisville, they ain’t got the sense,” Tom Hardin said. “They spend as much time yelling at each other as at the dogs. You stop for a second when the wind is blowing right, and you’ll hear the old man after his wife, or her after him, or both of ‘em after the son and all of ‘em after the dogs in between. I’ll be sorry to see that bridge come through, and not just for what it’ll do to the trapping. We get along just fine with a river in between, and the wider the better.”

They were near the river itself now--she smelled its cold wetness and the mud. The path descended a steep, wooded limestone cliff to snake along the curves and oxbows of the flooded banks. They passed landmarks--two massive white oaks, all that remained of the farm where Rose Ella’s father had grown up; a creek that her father spoke of fording on his brother’s back, and that Rose Ella and Tom Hardin and Patch crossed using a log that the flood had lodged in place.

A little farther and they came to a carcass of a town. A vast grist mill stood at the river’s edge; the river funneled one turbulent arm through the remains of a sluice. But the millstone was gone, and thick water slid past and over the windowsills of the mill store and post office and church, all tilting drunkenly toward the water as if anticipating the flood’s carrying them away.

“My father talks about when his folks ran a whole town here,” Rose Ella said. “Well, a little town.”

The river sucked at her feet.

“All that work,” she said.

She hung back, letting Tom Hardin gain ground. With sunrise the sky was clearing and the wind was picking up, blowing now from the northwest, from across the river, and she wanted to listen. She cocked her head--she heard only the dogs’ howling, and the slipping and sliding gurgle of the water--unless those punctuating sounds were people yelling. She wouldn’t believe it. Nobody she knew argued like that--at least, no man and woman, and not practically at dawn. She would sooner believe in ghosts. A chill seized up her shoulders--someone walking over her grave, she told herself, though it could just as easily have been the yelp and yowl from the far riverbank or the brass-bra cold. She tugged at the leash--Patch was still straining toward the river--she looped the chain around her hand and dragged him along, to catch up with Tom Hardin.

They crested a small rise, to hear above the wind’s whistling a thrashing in the brush. Patch froze. His ears pricked up; he focused his eyes and nose on the path ahead. Tom Hardin quickened his step. Patch lunged the length of the chain, pulling her along.

The fox was almost invisible against the golden broom sage. He saw them and lay back, baring his teeth, not moving until they were almost upon him. Then he lunged with a high-pitched growl. In midair he reached the length of the trap’s tether. He jerked and fell to the ground.

Patch was feinting, dancing, barking at the end of his chain. Tom Hardin spoke a sharp word. Patch looked doubtful. “Sit, dammit!” Tom Hardin said. Patch lowered his haunches to the frozen earth. Tom Hardin waved Rose Ella forward. “Move around to the other side. Give him just enough slack to get the fox’s attention.”

She edged around. The fox leapt at her; she jumped back, scraping her pants on the thorns of last summer’s blackberry briers and teasel. “What if he bites?”

Tom Hardin set his lips in a tight line. “I’ll call a doctor. You don’t let him bite. Stay on your toes and out of his reach, and that goes for Patch, too. Make the fox come at you. I’ll take care of the rest.”

She stepped forward, paying out the choke chain that held Patch from tangling with the fox. The dog danced on his hind legs, straining at the chain and barking furiously, a deep bass bark counterbalanced by the high-pitched screams of the fox and underscored by the moaning from the hounds across the river, rising now in intensity and pitch.

The fox lunged again. She held her ground. Tom Hardin raised his walking stick. Stepping in, he struck from behind, a solid blow just behind the fox’s jaw. The fox slumped at her feet. Tom Hardin placed his boot behind the fox’s skull and stepped forward. Over Patch’s barks, over the howling from across the river, she heard the sharp crunch of the fox’s delicate neck.

For a moment they stood silent while the snow fell, dusting the fox’s thick ruddy coat. From its mouth a thin trickle of bright scarlet stained the snow. In the dull daylight its eyes glittered, still hot with rage.

Then Tom Hardin pulled out his flask. “Shit fire!” he cried. “That’s no mean job, trapping a fox. Look at that coat.” He took a long pull from his pint, threw his arms around her, kissed her hard on the mouth. “You done good, pistol. Here, take a drink.” He held out the pint to her.

Later she would convince herself (it would be very much later before she and Tom Hardin spoke to each other of this day) that she just forgot she was holding Patch. In a way it had been Tom Hardin’s fault--he offered her the pint, she loosened her grip on the chain to take it, Patch pulled free.

A simple enough excuse except that she wasn’t really a drinker and had no intention of drinking at what was practically the break of dawn. Rose Ella never saw much need to remind Tom Hardin of that particular fact, nor did she see much need for herself to recall it, though in the way of such things it returned across the years of its own accord, as clearly as the image of the frozen mink suspended under the water or of Patch’s broken body.

And now Patch was gone, a white-and-black half-breed bullet across the snow-flecked field, and Tom Hardin after him just as quick, his whiskey dropped in the snow. Rose Ella had no idea such a big man could move so fast. He leapt bushes, scrambled over a small ravine, plunged through briers, stumbled across the frozen ridges of last fall’s plowing, but Patch got to the river first, and then he was in it. Tom Hardin dropped his pack and splashed in after him--Rose Ella winced when he hit that cold, brown water--up to his knees, and only the tangle of driftwood and briers kept him from going farther. He stood there, muddy water swirling around his legs, crying as if his heart would break. “Patch! Patch!”

She watched the dog’s piebald head; she saw him caught up--not pulled under--there was hope, still. Then she saw him caught up, and his head jerked back--the choke chain, probably, wrapped around some underwater stump. She saw bearing down on him the floating sycamore trunk, saw it push him along, his paws flailing at its speckled girth, push him closer to the shore, into an eddy where maybe Tom Hardin could reach him--there was hope, still--until she saw it crush him against the gate of a half-submerged fence. In the stillness of this morning (what happened to the howling from the dogs across the river? This is where her mind went, not wanting to think about what she had done and why she’d done it, this is where her thoughts were as she was watching Patch go under), in the stillness she heard for the second time this morning the crunch of breaking bone, and the dog’s single sharp cry. The log rolled past Patch, around and over his head, a lazy, unconcerned, indifferent rolling, and then it was drifting downstream, leaving Patch hung against the gate, unmoving.

By the time Rose Ella reached the river’s edge, Tom Hardin was splashing through the water--up to his waist now, he was not so much walking as wafted along by eddies in the current. He caught Patch, slipped the chain from his neck, half-floated, half-carried him to the shore and into the field, where he fell to his knees and laid him out in the frozen mud. His hands passed over the dog--big, callused, competent hands, and to her everlasting humbleness Rose Ella Perlite felt rising within her that same hot swell that she’d felt earlier that morning when Tom Hardin had snapped off his walking stick. What would it mean, to have hands like those pass over her body in exactly that way?

“He’s still living,” she said, to say something.

“You could say that.” Tom Hardin did not look up.

“I didn’t let him go.” The falseness in her voice prodded her to spill some small part of the truth. “I mean, I might have wanted to, but I didn’t.”

“And why the hell did you want that.”

“Because I didn’t believe he would go for the river. I thought he was smarter than that.”

“Like smartness has anything to do with it.” He stumbled to his feet, scrabbled in his knapsack, stuck a pistol in her hand. “Shoot him. Go ahead, dammit. He’s no good for a hunter anymore and pet dogs are a dime a dozen. Or you can carry him home and play nurse. He’s yours, and I hope he lives to enjoy it. It’s up to you.” He retraced his path to retrieve the fox, then stalked away.

Alone with Patch. She studied the gun, studied the dog--his glazed eyes, the jerky rise and fall of his chest--broken ribs, probably, and a broken leg for certain, a compound break, the bone’s ragged edge cutting into his chest, striated layerings of muscle visible through the torn flesh. But not much blood, not yet. With help she might get him back to the truck alive. If he lived through that (not likely), then with a lot of help and a lot more luck she might nurse him back to some kind of three-legged health. Or she could leave him lying--something would get him within the hour. Turkey vultures at least, or bobcats, or just plain shock and cold.

She knelt, checked the magazine, put the pistol to his head, closed her eyes, pulled the trigger, felt the pistol’s recoil in her arm and somewhere deeper.

Among the debris cast up by the flood, she found some rags and waterlogged cardboard, not much but enough to wrap around the dog’s body. On her way back she tripped over the pint that Tom Hardin had dropped, and which still held a slug of whiskey. She lay Patch on the ground, raised the pint to the sky, made a wordless wish, downed it in a gulp. Then she gathered the dog back into her arms and carried him to the truck.

Tom Hardin had the engine running. When she reached the truck bed he opened the door and climbed out. “Well, I’ll be damned.” He opened the tailgate.

“Get out of my way,” she said. She heaved the dog, heedless of her clothes--she was covered with blood--into the truck. Where had she found such strength? She slammed the tailgate shut, tossed him the gun--she hoped it went off in his face. “Get me home, you goddamn son of a bitch.” Tom Hardin climbed into the cab, gunning the accelerator and shoving the truck into gear before she had her door closed.

They climbed a steep grade to sail wordlessly along the stony spine of an ancient ridge. Below and to either side, fog filled the hollows, pillowing white; overhead the sun pierced the clouds in patches of blinding blue. Caught and refracted in every ice-rimed branch and twig, a million brilliant suns dazzled their silence, and in that silence, in the avalanching memory of Tom Hardin’s careless, heedless, headlong run and the sure touch of his oversized hands, Rose Ella Perlite understood that here was a man with whom she had been called upon to reckon.