In a sense Will had saved Mary May, but it was not the kind of salvation any of them had wished for, or even thought to expect. He had come down off the cliff with Jerome and they had seen her there holding her brother and Will had wondered whether that brother in death was different than the brother in life and whether those two could ever be the same, as Mary May had so desperately wanted him to be.
Will knew that feeling, too. He knew what followed him through the trees and up the river was not anything he could touch or hold. It was an idea of the loved ones he had left behind, it was guilt and hope, it was memories of a past life that he thought might not be his life at all. He knew that feeling just as Mary May did now. He knew how one remakes the past in the image they want to see of the future. He could not blame her for that, people had been doing the same for millennia and it was nothing new to have hope, to want to try and make a change. It was nothing new to deny the past and embrace the future.
He set his bag down when he came to a little glade that ran a quarter mile up the valley, lined on all sides by paper birch and the thick underbrush of the mountain. He crossed to the river with his canteen and dipped it and watched the bubbles rise in the slow current, and then he drank fully. The water overflowed at the edges of his mouth and ran down through the scraggly hair of his beard. He realized now that he was half wild, that he had most likely been half wild even when all this had started and Lonny had come to him asking about the bear.
There were stores he had taken from the house he had shared with his wife and daughter, and he took a can of green beans out now and pried the top off with the opener he had taken from there as well. He had let himself into the house for only a moment and filled the bag with what he could, then left without a last good-bye to the house or the memories there. He knew they were never truly gone to begin with. He hoped that was something Mary May might learn about herself as well.
The sun was out above and he sat with his back leaning against the pack, his hat tipped down to shade his eyes. He dipped a finger down into the beans and then pulled them out one at a time. He ate them that way, keeping his eyes always on the shadows beneath the trees and the path the water cut among the rocks that lined it and the greater forest all around. There was something out there that was not memory or ghost and it was watching him from out of the forest he had passed through only minutes before.
Without moving but to set the can down and to gather up the rifle, Will watched the place among the brush that he was sure held whatever presence hunted him. He watched the shift of the brush, the way it caught and pulled, like something back there had taken hold. He stood now and moved closer, his feet cautious as they went. Will ready to run if he needed to, or ready to shoot, or simply ready for whatever it might be.
The flash of brown was the first thing he saw. The bush moved again and he saw the fur. It was a grizzly bear, but he could not tell its height or girth or anything more than that he was not alone. He thought of the big boar grizzly he had seen in the lightning storm that night. He thought of that same bear seen across the river a couple days later, probably returned to whatever haunts it had before. But Will knew it had not disappeared, that nothing disappeared, wherever it went it was always somewhere, like a ghost or like a memory that never seemed to fade.
The brush moved again. He could hear breathing. He could hear great lungs working and the movement of air. A branch snapped somewhere beyond and he almost jumped, pivoting slightly with the rifle still held in his hand. He did not know what was out there. Will had killed many in his life. Those that walked upright on two legs and those that walked on all four, and he had known even then that a price was owed. He was a sinner. He had taken and taken, and though he had tried to give back, he felt always that it was not enough.
He thought of his family back there in the cemetery in Fall’s End, he thought of Mary May and Jerome and all of Hope County. He knew all that had come to pass was only the beginning. He knew that whatever waited for him out there in the darkness, whether it was a grizzly bear or something else, was waiting for him still and would be waiting for as long as he chose to look away.
He took one step then another. He put a hand out to the brush and pulled away a branch. There was darkness beyond. An unknowable void that asked now for him to enter and see what had followed him for hours, and for days, and possibly for all the years of his life.
THERE WAS A GRAVE FOR DREW DOWN IN THE CHURCHYARD NOW. In the days that passed Mary May would go there and she would stand over the three of them and see the varying shades of green atop each one. Her mother’s grave was the oldest, then her father’s, and then Drew’s. The same dirt color as had been the earth through which Mary May and Jerome had dug themselves. Working in the nighttime to get the hole dug out six feet deep. Everyone in the town knowing what they were doing and none stopping to say a thing, none pausing, or even surprised to see another hole go in the ground and a body soon to follow.
The sheriff was the only one to stop by and really spend any time looking down into the pit they’d dug. He stood there, pushed up his hat with a finger, and looked down into that hole. When he finally brought his eyes to Mary May, he said, “I guess this means you found your brother.”
“Yes, it does.” Mary May sat in the shade next to Jerome. They had been working all through the night and into the morning and the sun had not yet fully crested above the church roof, leaving half the cemetery still in shadow.
“What did he die of?”
“His heart gave out.”
“That right?” the sheriff asked.
“That’s right.”
“Where are you keeping the body?” the sheriff asked.
“The county coroner’s office, same as where they took Mamma and Daddy.”
She could see him studying her. He turned and looked to the two other graves then turned and looked back at her. “If I go in there and ask what happened to him are they going to tell me his heart gave out?”
“I don’t know why they wouldn’t,” she said. “The coroner seemed to give it to us straight when Daddy was in there. An accident, I believe.”
“That’s what they called it at the time.”
“Did they change their minds?”
“No, not that I know of. But it’s getting hard to look past the circumstances here before us.”
“What circumstances are those?”
“Three dead from the same family in nearly the same amount of weeks. That’s something that is a little hard to overlook.”
Mary May looked up at him. “You said it, Sheriff.”
“I know I did.” He was shaking his head and looking down at the grave again. “You think if I go in there and ask that coroner what happened he will give it to me straight?”
“Is the coroner still bearded?” Mary May asked.
“Last I checked.”
“Sure,” Mary May said. “I bet he gives it to you just as straight as he did when Daddy died.”
The sheriff turned and looked to where Jerome sat on the meager grass beside Mary May. He had taken his collar off. He sat sweating with the first few buttons of his shirt undone and his sleeves rolled up over his elbows. “What do you say about all this?” the sheriff asked.
“Faith is a powerful thing,” Jerome said.
SHE CLEANED A GLASS THEN SET IT DOWN ON THE BACK BAR AND reached and brought up another. She was at this work five minutes before the double cab went by with four men inside, the truck pulling a horse trailer behind. The brakes were heard next and the muted tinge of the brake lights seen in the frames of the barroom windows.