Jacob stood with fists at his sides. “Your honor, I’d like to say that I can’t express the sorrow I feel.” So he didn’t. Instead, he made a general appeal at how sorry he was for everything and left it at that. I wondered mildly what everything entailed.
“Cody Pritchard, do you have anything you would like to say?”
He didn’t move and remained seated with his hands in his pockets. After a moment, he smirked and said, “No.” And I thought about how far I could get him through one of the second-story windows on one try.
Then Kyle Straub, the prosecuting attorney, stood and began the statement he hoped would assure that the defendants would serve significant jail time. He argued like a man on fire that these young men must not go free and that anything less than strong sentencing for all four would be the final punch line in the unending joke that this trial had become. Vern looked up at that one, too.
Because of their ages when they had raped Melissa Little Bird, Kyle anticipated that Vern might sentence the three young men convicted of rape to a youth facility rather than to a prison. Offenders sent to youth facilities were usually not given a minimum sentence, which placed the duration of imprisonment squarely on the shoulders of prison officials. All of which meant that the prosecution needed a five-year minimum sentence or the convicted would be available for parole in a much shorter period of time. The judge must set a minimum; even I got that.
I tripped but caught my balance before I buried myself in the snow. It was getting deeper, about at midcalf, and my plodding was becoming more forced. Other than my feet, the only part of me that consistently felt warm was my chin and nose. The smell of gasoline and used motor oil from the shop rag was beginning to get to me. My legs were tired, my back ached, and the seat cover was doing little as protection. With my hands embedded into the nylon pockets, I had been unable to keep the wind from periodically lifting up the rear of the poncho and sending a brisk nor’wester up my back, so my fingers became victims to my attempts at keeping the seat cover wrapped around me. They caused me the most pain, until they lost all feeling. The problem with stepping in the rut of the path was that my boots kept slipping on the angle, sometimes causing me to slide on the frozen, uneven ground. When this happened, I was forced to throw out my arms in an attempt to maintain my balance. It was in one of these equilibrium episodes that I lost it.
I hit the ground face first because my hands were tangled in the seat cover. It didn’t hurt as badly as I thought it would, so I lay there for a moment as the snow next to my face began to melt. The stinging in my eyes bothered me, but it felt like a good place to rest. Somehow, it didn’t feel as cold there on the ground, and a comfortable, dreamy quality began seeping in with the melting snow. I exhaled a breath to clear the snow away from my shop-rag veil, but it didn’t clear very well. It should have bothered me, but it didn’t. It felt like I was getting enough air, and enough was all I needed. I became aware of a weight that pressed down on every part of my body, like a warm blanket. I struggled a little to clear my hip from a rock that was pressing up from underneath the snow pack and felt a burning sensation in my right ear. Somehow it had gotten uncovered, so I jostled my right arm loose from the nylon and started working my hand up to the exposed flesh.
I listened to the wind and was thinking about just taking a short nap when I heard them. Their voices were high, shifting in and out of the wind along with the sound of chimes or maybe very small bells. It was bells, the sound of thousands of miniature bells, not finely tuned ones, but lesser bells, handmade bells. I listened as they swirled and rounded with the wind and snow. It was as if the bells were not ringing unto themselves but were brushing against something as they continued on their way, turning and stepping with the wind, starting a rhythm that overtook their circular motion. They had started in the distance, but it now seemed as if they were all around me, and they were insistent.
There were shadows too, but these were different from the ones I had seen before. These shadows moved in and out of the snow-covered trees with a different purpose, one that seemed more complicated than that of the ones before. Where the others had moved in a single line along with me, these seemed to enjoy the infinite patterns of the wind, the snow, the trees, and maybe other things that I could not see.
I lay there with my loose hand ready to close the small aperture of the seat-cover hood like a small child afraid to look yet afraid to look away. It was hard to see because my eyelids were trying to freeze shut; my fingers no longer moved individually so I rubbed the butt of my hand across my eyes and blinked to clear my sight. The swirling was right in front of my face now, and it carried the rhythm of many. The patterns swooped in close to the ground and then snapped back quickly as if teasing the ground to follow. I reached my hand out to touch one of the strands, but it slipped through my fingers with the snowflakes. I reached out farther but, every time I got close, the white tendrils whirled away. I placed my arm under me, pushed myself up on one elbow, and looked through my tunnel of snow-coated cloth. They were small, cone-shaped bells that chimed lightly as they moved in tiny rows across well-rounded cloth, which draped from opulent forms. The bells continued to ring even when the wind-fringe swept them away.
I pulled myself over to one side of the walking trench and sat there for a moment, listening to the voices, to the bells as they ascended into the treetops. These voices were in a higher register than the ones that had accompanied me on my way down, and they comforted and stimulated at the same time. I pulled the makeshift hood back and felt my head loll sideways onto my left shoulder. The long fringed fingers traced fire trails across the length of my shoulders, but when I turned they snapped into the retreating snow. I felt another set cross the small of my back, but when I straightened, they too continued up the trail. I pulled a leg under me, toppled into a crouch, and then stood. It was difficult to walk at first, but the rhythm of the tiny bells and the way the tassels and cloth stretched across languid muscles drew me forward.
Voices were speaking into my exposed ear, whispering in tongues that I didn’t understand. I could never hear the beginnings or the ends of the sentences, only the smoldering playfulness that fueled them. The words simultaneously tickled and burned. Some were lugubrious and extended; others were short and sharp like surprised snatches of breath. I listened to the words and the melody and staggered upward, the hillside rising to meet my feet as they sank into the receptive snow. It was much deeper now, and the wind flattened the hanging cloth of the seat cover to the back of my legs and froze it there, pulling at the top of my head whenever a hind step lingered an instant too long.
I didn’t pay any attention to the path any longer. I just followed the tinkling silver bells and the swirling deerskin as they continued in their circular pattern up the hill. Their mouths didn’t smile, but their eyes did. The same glittering obsidian as before, but with a great deal more promise, with promises of everything under arched eyebrows and thick lashes.
The ground grew flatter for a while and then steepened in the opposite direction as my heels began striking the muffling snow before my toes. The momentum carried me forward, and I only slowed as the other voices joined in, the voices from before. They provided a strong bass counterpoint to the ascension of the bells and harmonized with the wavering beauty of the voices that had gone before me up the hill. Then, on the path ahead, I could see them standing in a group, looking down at something on the ground. They all smiled the close-mouthed smile and looked back to me. I trudged on and stood there among them, looking around and smiling, too. But there was something at the middle of the group, something that didn’t move, and I rested my chin on my chest to look at it. It was large and it looked heavy, but they seemed to prize it in some way, so I leaned down and brushed some of the snow away. When I finished brushing the majority of the snow off it, I stood back with the others and listened to a new song, one that sounded much closer, with words that I remembered. I could hear all of this song, the beginning, middle, and end. It was a very forceful melody, and it was coming from the thing in the path.