Chapter 8: The Reeds at the Village Mouth

The Reeds at the Village Mouth

Sidney Hale came up the lane with the heel of his hand pressed into one eye, the way a man does when he has been looking too long at a thing that will not come clear, and when he took the hand away there was his own yard in front of him: the woodpile, the flat stone by the gate, the shed leaning off to the west. He kicked a stone out of the path on his way in.

“Melons,” he said. “Two rows of them out behind that house and you cannot get one off them. They sit on the whole patch as if it were money. And three or four of them up the lane in the dark with knives on their belts, as if a knife ever opened a door. That house is holding on to something, and not one of them can look a man in the eye.”

Nobody was out to hear it. His own door was shut and the window behind it dark, and up the lane the main Hale house stood with its shutters closed and its lamp down low, every one of them inside with nothing to say to anybody. It sounded no different out loud from the way it had in his head, so he let it sit.

He sat down on the flat stone and put his hands on his knees. He rubbed at the eye again with the flat of his thumb.

Then his mouth slowed down, the way it did when the thought underneath was better than the ones on top of it.

Elias had been out of this village better than twenty years. Gone at thirteen with nothing in his hands, and back with land bought and paid for, a wife out of a family with a name on it, and money enough to lay stone in his own front yard. Nobody did that on what a man made in a field. Twenty years out in the world and a man picks things up. Good things. Things a man does not show.

Sidney dragged his heel through the dust, drew a line, wiped it out.

“He has an accident on the road,” he said. “Or he takes sick, or the winter takes him. Then somebody has to go through that house. And by rights what’s in that house is as much ours as anybody’s.”

Behind him the gate creaked.

His brother Edwin came in with his shoulders up and his eyes on the ground, stepping around the loose stones, and stopped at the edge of the yard like the yard belonged to somebody else.

Sidney turned on the stone. “Get over here.”

Edwin came three steps, and Sidney had him by the front of his shirt and swung him around and put him down on the ground by the shed, hard. The boy rolled once and came up folded small against the boards with his arms over his head.

“You and the Hale boy,” Sidney said. “The one you run with.”

Edwin said nothing into his sleeve.

“Tomorrow you go up there. There’s a melon patch along their back wall. Help yourself to two. If somebody comes out, you say you were hungry, and you sniffle some, and you go on home.” Sidney wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “And while you’re up there keep your eyes open. How many of them are about the place. What’s in the yard. Whether the shed has a lock on it.”

Edwin did not move.

“You hear me?”

The boy said something into his sleeve that was probably yes.

Sidney stood over him a moment longer. Then he went in and pulled the door shut behind him and dropped the latch, and the yard was left with the stone and the woodpile and a boy lying curled by the shed in the dark.

At the tail of Alder Creek, Elias Hale came along the track with a flitch of cured pork under one arm and three of his sons behind him.

It was full dark by then and warm, and people were sitting out on their doorsills with their backs against the frames, letting the day go, watching the lane the way people watch it when there is nothing else left to do.

“Elias. Where are you off to this hour?”

“Taking something up to the schoolmaster.” He lifted the pork so they could see it and grinned, and the man on the sill laughed and waved him on, and Elias went on.

At the top of the lane the houses stopped. Past the last stump the reed flats began, thick and high, running off toward the water and shaking a little in the wind that came off the mere, so that the whole stand of them moved together and kept moving.

Elias stopped where the road gave out. He looked back once at the dark where the village was, and forward once at the dark where the reeds stood, and then he put a hand on each of his sons’ shoulders, Gareth on one side and Duncan on the other, and said, low:

“Go.”

They understood him. Duncan bent and Gareth bent, and the two of them went into the reeds and were gone, and after that there was nothing to see but the tops of the reeds rocking.

He stood and looked after them.

“You could have told them,” Corwin said at his shoulder. “Before they went in. If you see anything out of the common, look at it from a distance and come back out. Don’t go near it. Don’t follow it.”

“Gareth has sense,” Elias said.

He did not turn his head.

The sum had already been done. He had done it in his own yard an hour before, with the lamp behind him and the door shut, and he had done it again walking down the lane, and both times it came out the same. He had four sons. He was putting two of them into that water in the dark, and if the night took both of them he would still have Corwin beside him, and the house would still stand, and the fields would still be worked, and there would still be a Hale name on this land.

Something came up in him then that had no use in it at all. He held the pork against his side with one arm and closed the other hand into a fist, once, hard, and let it go.

Two hundred years. Two hundred years this family had had its hands in this dirt, from before anybody in the village could remember, and now there was a thing sitting in his own house that he could not explain and would not let another living soul look at, and he had put two of his boys into the reeds for the sake of it.

He narrowed his eyes and stood there until he could no longer tell the reeds from the dark. Then he turned and walked on toward the schoolmaster’s fence with the pork under his arm.

The schoolmaster’s house sat back off the road with a bench beside the door and a row of bean poles behind it. Hobbs was at his table over the last of a bowl when the step came on the flags outside. He got up with the bowl still in his hand and opened the door and stood in it, looking.

Elias Hale was out on the flags with a flitch of cured pork under his arm.

“Master Hobbs.”

Hobbs looked at the pork. Then he looked at Elias. He had forgotten the bowl was in his hand.

“Elias,” he said.

“There’s more of that than I can eat.”

“This is too much.” Hobbs said it and took the flitch anyway, smiling and nodding, and set it down on the bench. He went inside for the knife.

He cut a length off the end and sliced it fine and laid the slices on a small plate. There was a jar of pickled greens under the shelf; he fried those too and brought them out. They carried the low bench around to the front of the house and set the plates on it and poured two cups of small ale, and then they sat down side by side with their backs to the wall and the road in front of them and the moon coming up over the ridge.

“Nobody has seen one of the sky-walkers come down over this valley in years,” Elias said. He let the breath go out of him slow, and drank, and his face stayed easy the whole time.

Hobbs shrugged one shoulder. “Sky-walkers,” he said, and there was a kind of envy in the way he said it, the way a man says the name of a place he has never been.

“Did you ever see one?”

“Once.” Hobbs set his cup down and looked at the plate. “I was twelve years old. A man came to the town.”

He took a slice of the pork and ate it slowly, and Elias waited.

“He said he wanted children born with the Opening,” Hobbs said. “They had every child in that town out in the square for him, better than a thousand of them, and he looked at every one. He found three. He took the three away with him that same evening, and by dark he was gone and there was not a mark left on the square.” He wiped his hands on his breeches. “I was standing in that line. Everybody was standing in that line.”

“You were twelve,” Elias said.

“I was twelve.” Hobbs laughed a little, and there was not much in it. “I have thought, once or twice since, that one of those three might have been from my own street. Some boy I knew by sight. I could not tell you which one. Nobody could.”

“Did you ever hear where he took them?”

“Up.” Hobbs looked at the moon. “That was all anybody was ever told. Up.”

Elias drank. Down past the bean poles the wind went through the reeds and they lay down and came back up.

“A rare thing,” Hobbs said. “To be taken.”

Elias did not answer that. He turned his cup a little on the bench and put it down again, and for a while they both watched the road, which was empty in both directions and had been empty all evening.

“They did not come back,” Hobbs said. “That is the other half of it, and nobody says that half out loud. You send a boy up and you never hear his name again, and after a few years you stop saying it, and after a few more you cannot remember what he looked like, and you are an old man sitting on a bench in a village that is not even the one you were born in.” He picked up his cup and drank and set it back down. “I did not go. My father would not have it. I have been in this valley forty-eight years now and I have taught every child in it that can hold a pen.”

“You have taught them well enough,” Elias said.

“I have taught them to read,” Hobbs said. “That is not the same thing.”

The ale was down in both cups. The moon had cleared the ridge and the light of it lay along the road in front of them along with the shadows of the bean poles, and off past the last fence the reeds stood up black against the water, all the way out, with nothing moving in them now that the wind had dropped. Hobbs watched the moon. Elias looked off down the road where it ran out of the village into the dark, and neither of them said anything more.