“I’m not trespassing,” Gwen says quickly. Maybe she’s been crying about her father and maybe she hasn’t been. This bright sunlight could bring tears to anyone’s eyes. “It’s this horse. He loves apples.”
“All right,” the Coward says in a surprisingly mild voice. Now he sees, there are indeed tears on this girl’s cheeks. “Let him eat.”
The Coward sits on the rickety front steps of his porch. The ice makes everything in the distance shine like diamonds. The Coward blinks in the light. He has always believed that if vodka looked like anything, it would look like ice. Gin, on the other hand, was pure, clean snow.
“You don’t know me.” the girl says.
She has come to sit beside him on the steps, which cannot be a pleasant experience, the Coward is certain, since he can’t remember the last time he bathed. But in fact, his odor is no more offensive than marsh grass or old apples, slightly vinegary.
“I’m Gwen,” the girl says. “My father is Richard Cooper. My mother is March.”
The Coward appraises her. His niece, if what she’s saying is true. Well, she does have the Cooper nose, straight and narrow, and those pale blue eyes.
“I don’t take after my mother, if that’s what you’re thinking. But you’re my uncle all the same.”
“For all the good it will do you,” the Coward says.
Gwen laughs. “Screwed-up family.”
“You have no idea,” the Coward tells her.
Gwen rests her chin on her hand and watches Tarot munch apples. It’s actually beautiful out here, if you don’t mind the isolation. If loneliness isn’t a factor. Before she can say another word, the Coward has risen from the steps and is already heading for his house. He can’t take too much of people. Five minutes is just about tops.
“Where are you going?” Gwen asks.
He doesn’t want to think about his family. That’s sorrow, plain and simple, and besides, he’s got better things to do.
“I’m going inside,” he tells the girl.
“To drink?” The horse has come near, so Gwen stands and reaches for the reins. “That’s what you do, right? It’s like your occupation or something, isn’t it? Being a drunk?”
“Drunkard,” the Coward corrects.
He squints against the glare of the diamonds in the Marshes. If he wants to, he can go inside and pretend there’s no one beneath his apple tree.
“In case you’re interested, your son doesn’t drink at all. He won’t even have a beer. Even if everyone else is completely wasted, he won’t touch the stuff.”
The Coward has reached his front door, but he doesn’t go inside.
“You’d be proud of him,” Gwen says.
Although the Coward’s back is toward her, she knows he’s listening.
“If you ever took the trouble to know him.”
When the Coward turns to face this girl, she has her hands on her hips. Clearly, she’s not the sort to back down from things. If she loves you, she’ll fight for you, and that’s what she appears to be doing right now.
“What makes you think I have a choice on that topic?” The Coward’s voice sounds harsh.
“Because you do,” Gwen says. “You just do.”
The Coward watches as she leads the horse out of his yard, around the garden gate, then into the Marshes, where the ice has begun to melt in the thin afternoon sunlight. There’s something hot in the center of the Coward’s chest, so he sits back down on his porch. The floorboards are loose; beneath them is a den of raccoons. When the Coward walks across these marshes, to Route 22, and the liquor store beyond, that is his choice. In all these years, he has not stopped to think other choices were his to make as well.
Do what you want, do what you will, do what you have to, do what you think you cannot.
He feels sick inside. If he’s having a stroke, then it’s a suitable penance for all the ruin he’s brought upon his tired body. If it’s a broken heart, he deserves that too. Tonight will be so chilly he’ll have to burn extra wood in his old stove, and the smoke will billow out into the Marshes like a flock of blackbirds. He’ll drink ice and snow, he’ll drink himself senseless, and he’ll be surprised to discover that when he wakes the next day, on his hard, cold floor, he’ll still hear that girl’s words ringing in his ears.
Part Three
16
How much snow will fall this winter? That’s what people want to know. How much wood should be stored beside the front porch? How much cash allotted to the Snow Shovelers’ Fund, which pays local boys to excavate driveways and sidewalks for the town’s senior citizens? Judgment is, there’s a long, hard season in store, at least among those who frequent the Lyon Cafe, and this theory has been seconded by the patrons of the reading room at the library as well. Just see how high the hornets have built their nests, always a sign of deep snow to come. Sheep and horses have especially thick coats for November. Squirrels are still storing chestnuts. Warblers have already migrated south, moving through town much earlier than usual, forsaking their nests in the ivy.
Ken Helm has a mountain of firewood outside his small house. He’s been chopping wood all summer and throughout the fall. His wife and two sons don’t even notice the sound anymore, but they hear it in their dreams; a rhythmic hewing that echoes whenever they close their eyes. Susanna Justice drives out to order wood for the season, for her parents and for herself, as she does every year. It doesn’t take much to heat Susie’s little cottage, but she’s heard this winter’s going to be a killer.
“The Judge always gets his delivery first,” Ken tells Susie after she’s ordered two cords and is making out the check. “My favorite customer.”
Susie smiles, but her mind is elsewhere. She’s a bulldog all right; she can’t let go, especially when she’s got the sense that she’s onto something. Yesterday she went into Boston to speak with the oncologist at Children’s Hospital who was in charge of Belinda and Hollis’s son, Cooper. Cooper was diagnosed with leukemia when he was four, and although the doctor refused to let Susie see the boy’s records, he insisted nothing was out of the ordinary. Nothing out of the ordinary to get a death sentence for your four-year-old. Nothing out of the ordinary to be married to a man as distant and mean as Hollis, to hold your little boy in your arms all the way home from Boston after the doctor informs you of a diagnosis as cruel as that.
“Is Hollis still letting you cull through his woods?” she asks when she hands Ken Helm his check.
“I pay him good money for it,” Ken says, defensively, as if she’d accused him of dealing with the devil. “I wouldn’t take anything from him for free. I pay for the use of his land, but that doesn’t mean I like him.”
As soon as Susie hears that twist in Ken’s voice, she knows he wants to tell her something. When she began working at The Bugle, it took a while before she understood that just because people don’t answer directly doesn’t mean they won’t eventually tell all. Ken will talk, all right, if Susie asks the right questions.
“Were you using his woods back when Belinda was alive?”
Ken Helm has been accompanying Susie to her parked truck. Now, he stops.
“I didn’t say anything about Belinda.”
“That’s true. You didn’t.” He knows something, all right.
“Is there something you wanted to ask me about her?” Ken holds his hand above his eyes to block the sun, but the result is, Susie can’t gauge his reaction.