Pet came in the door stomping the snow from her boots. She handed Ludlow the letter from Tristan and looked away. So did Decker. Only One Stab watched Ludlow open the letter, not fearing the worst possible or probable because he owned the Cheyenne sense of fatality that what had happened had already happened. You couldn't change it and trying to was like throwing stones at the moon.
Still very much in his late prime Ludlow grew old overnight. His stunned grief lapsed in and out of anger, and he took to drink which exacerbated his remorse. In a certain state of drunkenness his anger would turn into rage and this broke the threads of his vigor as if his tendons had been sprung, and he became stooped and careless of his appearance. He read Tristan's fatal letter so many times it became frayed and soiled. When the official letter of condolence came he did not open it nor did he respond to his wife's daily stricken letters. He was not beside himself so much as he was submerged in his own powerlessness. And how could they lock Tristan up before he scalped every Goddamn Hun on the continent. And what was this mustard gas that killed so that men ran around helplessly with blinded eyes and burning lungs and the horses screamed under them. The world was no longer fit for a war and he privately seceded from it. Pet mourned and little Isabel stayed out of the way, reading children's stories to One Stab who one evening joined his friend and mentor in drinking, not spitting it out for a change. But within an hour Decker had to restrain him, then give him more drink so that he would sleep and carry him to his hut after One Stab sang a song in Cheyenne about Samuel's life and his forest hikes and microscopes that revealed invisible worlds, then moved into the Cheyenne death song at which Ludlow broke down not having heard the song since forty years before in the Mauvaises Terres when a scout had died.
In Paris Tristan began to plan his escape after the first night in the ward, the noise of which was a symphony of the deranged. Unlike Ludlow who was wealthy and of a generally sentimental nature, the wealth in recent years protecting him from the actual machinery of civilization, Tristan's guilt was specific and limited to the dead body of his brother, the heart sunk in a canister of paraffin. Only Alfred as a child of consensual reality escaped this guilt. So Tristan told the doctor by the third day that he could not bear the asylum and would travel somehow to his grandfather's in Cornwall. The doctor said you can't do that but without conviction. He spoke of the matter to his superior officer who knew of Ludlow's reputation—the military world being somewhat clubbish in those days. The colonel said merely to let Tristan escape saying that the man was totally disabled and should be given swift passage home. On Tristan's daily walks through the Bois and over to the nearly deserted stable of Longchamps he had watched horses being ridden and exercised. One day he bought a fine mare, knowing that the trains demanded official passes. He told the doctor his intentions and the doctor wrote a note. At dawn Tristan packed his meager duffel and slipped by a sleeping attendant. It took him five days to ride to the coast through rain which changed to sleet and periodic snow. He rode swiftly through checkpoints saluting wildly at a full gallop, the horse throwing a shoe at Lisieux which was quickly repaired at an exorbitant rate by a blacksmith. At Cherbourg he caught a freighter with relative ease to Bournemouth outside of which he bought another horse riding west to Falmouth on the coast of Cornwall. One cold midnight with the Atlantic roaring outside the breakwater he presented himself at his grandfather's door. This late night knocking brought his grandfather in his nightshirt armed with a Beasley purchased in New Orleans. Tristan said, "I am William's son, Tristan." And the grandfather held the lantern high and recognized him from photos and said, "So you are." The captain woke his wife who made a meal and the captain drew out his best bottle of Barbados rum to welcome this madman he had heard of for twenty years.
Tristan spent a taciturn month in Cornwall with the word reaching Ludlow he was safe after his escape. The first morning the captain had him working on the schooner at the most menial jobs, Tristan not knowing anything about ships but quick to learn of hawsers, knots and sails. The captain had a load of rebuilt generators bound for Nova Scotia, in March, to return with a load of salted beef to be picked up in Norfolk on the way back. He would drop Tristan in Boston to be with his grieving mother and he could make his way home from there. They set sail in March on their antique ship crewed by four old sailors and tight watches—able men were needed for England's war effort. Tristan hacked ice from the rails for a week before the weather turned only a shade warmer, but fair. He was dropped without ceremony in Boston after three weeks at sea. Tristan made his way to South Station and nursed a bottle of rum on the mile run to Dedham where Susannah fainted when he arrived at her father's door. She did not know that he had promised to meet the old captain three months later in Havana.
Tristan, Alfred, Isabel and Susannah sat in a darkened parlor in Louisberg Square; two sons, a mother, a betrothed lover who felt she had improperly invaded their grief. Tristan was stiff and abrupt and Alfred gray and somehow coarsened, and Isabel could not control herself. They readied themselves to attend a memorial service arranged by Samuel's Harvard College friends. Then Tristan announced he would marry Susannah in a few days and his mother denied him permission saying that it was improper to marry even before the funeral. Tristan was curt and manic telling her she might attend if she wished.
Tristan and Susannah married at her family's country place near Dedham and the occasion was hopelessly solemn. Only Susannah's two sisters understood how she could marry a man her parents disliked though they had long been friends of Isabel's.
One late April morning Ludlow went to meet the train in muddy clothes which betrayed his increasing eccentricity. He had been repairing the frost damage to the Cornish stone fence surrounding the ranch house. It was not that he had any sentimental dislike for barbed wire, only that he did not like to look at it. Isabel had requested the Presbyterian minister for the funeral the next day but Ludlow hadn't contacted the man, failing to understand what he had to do with Samuel.
Tristan and Susannah scarcely had left their compartment on the train trip which Isabel thought was indecent and which enlivened Alfred's secret jealousy. Tristan had in mind the making of a son to replace his brother and that was the sole purpose of his marriage, in essence a cruel impulse he knew, but could not help himself. When he embraced his father at the railroad heading he trembled but did not weep until he embraced One Stab.
Early the next morning, a brilliant spring morning with the fresh green pastels of budding aspens and new grass, they buried Samuel's heart up in the canyon near the spring. Isabel saw all their lives becoming history in units of days and nights so fatally private there was no one left for her to love. One Stab watched Decker fill the hole from up on the hillside. When everyone left he walked down the hill and looked at the stone but could not read the words.