Chapter 5: The Second Row

The melons ran down the slope behind the Hale house in nine rows, and Sidney Hale lay on his belly between the first row and the second with one hand out in the dark on a melon he had already found.

It would be his if he could get it up off the dirt and over the wall with him. It was one melon. His uncle had four hundred of them on that slope and threw the soft ones to the hogs; Sidney’s father had been lying in the same bed going on four years, and there was nothing on that table that had not come off somebody else’s ground, and that was a fact about the way things were, and not about Sidney Hale.

He turned it on the vine the way you turn a ready one, easy, and had it up in both hands, cold on the underside where the dirt had kept it, when he heard the steps.

They came up the row from the house, slow, and stopped.

He kept still. It was in him from a lifetime of nights: the thing that stops in the dark is the thing that is looking. So he lay with his cheek down in the dirt and the melon under his chin, and did not so much as breathe.

Then something came between him and the moon, and the row went dark.

There was a man standing over the vines.

Sidney did not need the face. There was one man in the village who stood like that, with his weight back on his heels and his hands loose and nothing at all to say, and Sidney had eaten at his table every winter of his life.

Then his uncle’s hand had him by the front of the coat and he was off the ground and hanging, and the melon was somewhere behind him in the dark, rolling down the row.

“Uncle,” he said. “Uncle, please.”

His uncle’s face was up there above him, close, and it was working like weather.

Then Sidney saw the other hand.

He knew that knife. He had watched it on the whetstone on that porch a hundred afternoons, the long blade going back and forth and the water running off the stone, and nothing at all on his uncle’s face while he did it. There was nothing on it now.

The words went out of Sidney like water out of a cracked crock.

“Uncle,” he said. “I wasn’t—“

Two more had come down the row and stood behind his uncle — out of the house, no lamp, no hurry to them. One of them had a staff, and knew how to hold it.

The staff came down across his arm and pinned it to his ribs, and Sidney made a noise he had not planned on making.

“What are you doing in my father’s field?” Gareth said.

Sidney could not get anything out.

Then a hand took him by the hair and turned his face up into the light and held it there and looked at him a while, and let go.

“Cousin,” Corwin said.

“Melons,” his uncle said, and opened his hand and set him down on his feet, and put the knife back along his side, and turned and walked to the house without another word.

Gareth lifted the staff off him. “Nothing against you, cousin,” he said, in the flattest voice Sidney had ever had turned on him, and he went after his father.

Corwin pulled him up straight and brushed the front of his coat with the flat of his hand. There was wet on Sidney’s face, and not all of it was dirt, and Corwin wiped that too, with the hem of his shirt, and stood there a moment looking at him.

“You should have come up to the door,” he said.

“It was one melon.”

“I know it.”

He walked him out to the gate in the wall with his hand flat on Sidney’s back, and lifted the latch for him.

“There’s a light on in the kitchen,” he said. “Go on by it. And don’t stand in the road and tell it.”

Then the gate was shut, and the bar went down on the far side of it.

It was a mile to his father’s house. Sidney walked it with wet knees and his hands down inside his sleeves, and by the time he came up on the bridge at Brow Creek he had settled on how he would tell it, and there was nothing in it about any melon.

His father had come to the door of the back room and called him out, and Duncan had gone out and pulled the door to on his mother and Corin behind him. His father had gone back out to the yard, and Duncan had sat down at the long table to wait for them to come in, and that had been a while ago.

He had his hands flat on his knees. The lamp had been turned down to a fingernail of light. Outside, the dog had not made a sound since supper. It barked at something every night of the year, and Duncan had stopped waiting to hear it.

Then there were steps on the porch, and the door opened, and Gareth came in first with the staff in his hand and their father behind him with the long blade. Their father pushed the door to behind them.

Duncan looked behind them into the dark of the doorway.

“Where’s Corwin?”

“Walking somebody out,” his father said, and shook his head. Duncan could not tell which of the two the shake was for.

His father laid the blade down along the end of the table.

“That boy has been coming up to this house with his hand out since he was big enough to walk to it,” he said. “I know what he is. What I don’t know is what went home with him tonight.”

Gareth pulled the other stool out and sat, and looked at Duncan across the table, and Duncan knew that look and got his eyes down on the boards, because his brother had something in his mouth that had come out of a book.

Then the door opened behind them and Corwin came in.

He got as far as the middle of the room.

“What did you do that for?” he said.

“Do what?”

“One melon,” Corwin said. “You could have handed him the melon and a second one to put under his arm, and he would have gone down the road owing this house a kindness. Now he owes us something else.”

“There’s no his house and no my house,” his father said. “There’s one Hale house with more than one roof on it, and I am the head of it, and the melons are mine to give or keep.”

Corwin sat down. He had more, and he kept it.

Their father went to the door of the back room and spoke to the wood, loud enough to be heard on the far side of it and no louder.

“Corin. You take the front door. Your mother takes the back. If anybody comes at all, you call out, and nobody opens anything.”

Something answered him through the door, small.

Then their father shut the shutter over the window and turned around and put his hand flat on Duncan’s back.

“Now,” he said. “Tell them.”

Duncan brought it out of his shirt, where it had been against his skin since supper, and set it down in the middle of the table.

It was not much bigger than his palm, and it was blue-gray, and it was a mirror, broken across into seven or eight pieces that had not come apart, because the rim was holding them.

Corwin leaned in over it. He turned it, and held it up near the lamp, and turned it again in the light, and set it down.

“Well,” he said, “I don’t know.”

“It came out of the water,” Duncan said. “Brow Creek, below the ford, in under the cut bank where the crawdads sit. I had my hands down in the silt and I came up with that.”

Gareth said, “And then you carried it up to the house and put it in Pa’s hand.”

“I showed it to him. Out in front. In the yard.”

Their father put his hand out, and Duncan put it into the hand.

He looked at it a while. Then he was done looking at it, and he tipped his head back and looked up at the ceiling, at the one place over the far end of the room where a shingle had come off and the moon came through it at that hour of the night.

He got up and took the stone bench away from the wall with both hands and set it down in the light, and put the glass on the bench, face up.

The light came down out of the hole in the roof onto the face of it, and did not lie down.

It stood. It came up off the glass about a finger’s width and gathered into a ring, thin and pale, the color of frost on a window in January, and it stayed.

Corwin came up off his stool. He stood over the bench and did not sit down again.

Gareth had the long blade across his knee and the rag going up and down it. His hands were not steady and he did not stop.

Duncan had seen it once already that night, out in the yard, and the second time was no better. “I never saw anything like it,” he said, and it came out small.

His father laughed. It was a low sound with nothing in it, and when he raised his eyes off the glass they were hard.

Nobody said anything. The wick of the lamp burned down the width of Duncan’s thumbnail, and then another width, and nobody said anything.

Gareth stopped the rag on the blade.

“It’s the Bright,” he said.

Corwin turned his head. “What?”

“The Bright. It came off one of them.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Then tell me what it is.”

Corwin went to the far wall and came back. “If that goes out of this room,” he said, “that’s all of us. That’s every soul in this house.”

“And if it is theirs,” Gareth said, “they’ll be here for it. Tomorrow, maybe, or the day after. Walking the creek and knocking on doors. And when they come to this door, what do we say?”

“They’d give something for it,” Duncan said. “Wouldn’t they? If it’s theirs, and they wanted it back, whatever they gave—“

“Horseshit,” his father said.

“I have heard the Bright kill,” he said. “I have heard it told by men who don’t make things up, and that is the whole of what I know about them, and it is enough. Now look at what is on that bench. It has been lying on the bottom of a creek long enough to green over. If they wanted it, they would have had it up out of that water inside the week, and they would have done it with the sky doing whatever it does for them, so the whole valley would see and be afraid. Nobody came.” He put his hand down on the table. “So either they don’t want it, or the one it belonged to is past wanting anything.”

“Don’t,” Corwin said. “Not in this house.”

He put a hand out over the ring of light, and left it there, and took it back without touching anything.

Gareth had been quiet a while. When he spoke he spoke to his brother.

“You had it out in the yard.”

“Out in front of the house.”

“Where was Sidney Hale?”

“Down in the melons,” their father said. “I put my hands on him in the second row.”

Gareth kept his eyes on Duncan.

“Before that,” he said. “When the moon was over the mountain and you were standing out in front of this house with that in your hands. Where was he then?”

“Out in the fields somewhere,” Duncan said. “Anywhere. He’s always out in somebody’s fields.”

Gareth put the rag down on the table.

“Then he saw it,” he said.

Nobody put anything against it.

He stood up. Duncan had never seen that come down over his brother’s face before, and he looked at him, and looked at him longer than he should have. His brother did not look back.

He took the heavy coat off the peg by the door and put it over his arm, and the blade was still in his other hand, and he had his hand on the latch before anybody moved.

“I’ll be back before morning,” he said.

His father said, “Come back here.”

Gareth’s hand stayed on the door. The blade hung down along his other side, and the coat was over his arm.

His father turned his head and looked at Duncan, one flat look, and Duncan felt the whole of it and put his eyes down on the table.

At the front of the house, Corin shifted once on the boards, and then went still.

On the stone bench the pale ring stood over the glass.