Lonny laughed. “Some give more freely than others, but in the end they all will give.”
Will thought of the girl’s room. He thought about the past. He thought about how one drink led to another. He thought of another life altogether. Finally, he said, “In the church there is salvation.”
“You’re getting it now,” Lonny said. “And here I was starting to think you’d forgotten.”
THE BEAR PIT HAD BEEN DUG AT THE EDGE OF THE WOOD. THE roots cleanly cut and a thatch of thin pine had been woven to cover it all. At the bottom of the pit, thick, straight branches had been sharpened and then dug into the ground with their points toward the sky. Will looked it over and then, when he was satisfied, he brought the beavers out from the house and using a knife he cut away the string he’d used to tie off the castor glands.
“Did you have help with this?” Will asked, working to get the beavers hung on a thin metal wire that would span the opening of the pit.
“John came with a few of his men and they helped to dig the pit and then when it was done we sharpened the sticks and set them out below. He was quite impressed with your design.”
“You told him about the tiger?”
“I left out some parts.”
“Like how the tiger killed anyone who tried to hunt it?”
“Something like that,” Lonny said.
Will walked the edge of the pit, the wire trailing behind him. He came to a broad tree trunk and tied one end of the wire there.
“This is going to work?” Lonny asked.
Will looked to where Lonny was standing, his eyes on the wire and the beavers that waited there in the dirt. Will brought up one of the beavers and held it tail-end toward Lonny. “What do you smell?” he asked, holding the beaver still and watching as Lonny bent slightly, then his eyes raised on Will.
“Sweet? Almost like Christmas cookies?”
“It’s vanilla,” Will said. “There’s a gland here that smells and even tastes just like vanilla. The old-time trappers used to sell it. Sometimes they still do. Read the label on a box of cookies next time you’re at the store. I believe they list this stuff as natural flavoring.”
“You’re fucking with me.”
“I wish I was.”
“And bears like this stuff?”
“They love this stuff.” Will tied the other end of the wire to a tree on the opposite side of the pit and pulled the wire tight, suspending the beavers up over the center of the pit. “Like a fly to shit.”
“Or a bear to beaver ass,” Lonny said.
FOR AN HOUR, AFTER THEY HAD FINISHED, THEY SAT AT THE EDGE of the porch on dining room chairs they’d dragged from inside. Lonny smoked. He picked loose tobacco from his teeth and from his lips and flicked it away. He leaned forward with his forearms resting across his thighs, the cigarette dangling from his fingers. Mostly he watched the edge of the wood where the pit had been dug. He ran his eyes to the far mountains and at times he held out a hand and called for the rifle, putting the scope to his eye and searching through the deep shadows of the forest, or raising the barrel on the mountains so far away.
“You think he’s out there?” Lonny asked, handing the rifle back to Will.
“He’s out there,” Will answered. The forestock was warm where Lonny had held it. Will put the scope to his eye and looked through the glass, then brought the rifle back down again.
“What makes you so confident?”
“He has to be somewhere, doesn’t he?”
Lonny shook his head. “I don’t know how you can do this every day, just sit here like this and wait for something to chance out from between the trees,” he said, standing now. “I found a few liquor bottles the Kershaws had tucked away. You want any to pass the time?”
“You ever wonder what would happen if John or The Father came along and found you breaking their rules?”
“We all have our secrets,” Lonny said. “Every one of us.”
WILL WAITED. HE WATCHED LONNY TAKE DRINK AFTER DRINK and then watched the man curl up on the couch mumbling to himself with the bottle still in hand. Within five minutes there was the sound of his snoring.
Out in the field the light had started to go and the insects danced in the air, a few zigzagging in the last of the light, while others zoomed past like they had somewhere more important to be. He watched them for a time and he watched the place in the woods where the pit was, then he turned from the window and walked down the hall to the first bedroom.
He sat on the bed and looked about the place. A woman’s nightgown hung by a hook close by the door. The material thin and white, the sleeves very short and an intricate stitching at the edges of each that ran out and down and across at the chest. For a while he sat and studied it like some sort of mystery to be solved.
The light had gone out of the sky now and the whole room had grown dark. He ran his eyes over the place and took in the twin dressers and the mirror across the room. A single chair sat in a corner with a laundry basket on it, filled almost all the way to the brim with clothes that looked to be both female and male.
When his eyes came back around on the nightgown he did not know that he would do it until he did. He rose from his seat on the bed, took down the nightgown and held it in his hands. His wife had had one like this once. And though he had trained himself not to think about her, or his daughter, he thought of them now.
He brought the nightgown close to his face. He smelled lavender and dirt and something he thought maybe was sunscreen. He held the gown away from him now and he went to the bed and laid it in the place he thought that it went. Then he rounded the bed and sat for a while, telling himself this was all craziness, that if John or The Father walked in right now, they would know he had not been saved as he had said he was in that long ago time, and that what had troubled him then, still troubled him now, and no salvation by church or The Father could give him respite.
WHEN HE WOKE IN THE MORNING THE GOWN LAY ON THE BED beside him. He reached out a hand toward it and felt of the material and for a moment wished there to be flesh and blood there beside him. He thought of the woman who had been his wife and he thought of the life that had been his own. He closed his eyes and that’s when he heard the soft barking of what could have been a dog pup, but what Will knew was a bear.
Lonny was still asleep on the couch, the bottle fallen from his hand when Will came out of the room. The rifle was still where Will had laid it after coming in off the porch. He took it now, raised it on the pit at the edge of the forest, and looked through the scope. One beaver was missing from the wire and the thatch that covered the trap had been sprung.
Quickly he took the rifle from his shoulder, fingered back the bolt until he could see the bullet in the chamber. He slid the bolt back up into place, pushed the safety forward and now he looked about the room for his pack and the ammo he knew was within. When he found the pack and had pulled it on over his shoulders, he went out onto the porch into the morning light.
Again, he put the scope on the pit trap then ran his eye along the edge of the forest. Everything was as it had been before, except for the one beaver and the latticework covering that had hid the spikes below.
When the barking came again to his ear he knew what they had caught was not the big boar grizzly he had seen in the rain. No, this was not that. He came down off the porch and, as quick and silent as he could, he crossed through the field and came to the place the pit had been dug and looked down.
The bear was a female grizzly and Will knew now why the big boar had come down from the mountains, hungry and following the mother and cub. When Will looked up at the forest there was no sign of the cub he knew there to be. The silence of the place was now full and complete and the cub may be on the run, but most likely hiding. Down in the pit the mother bear lay dead. The spikes seen in places where they had punctured her body and come up through her skin. The sharpened white of the wood now tinged red with her blood.