Michael shrugged, his eyes carefully fastened on the book that rested against his drawn-up legs. Janet crossed the small room, sat down on the bed, then picked up the book, closed it, and put it on the nightstand. Only then did Michael look at her.
"Would you like to talk about what happened?" she asked.
Michael's brows knit into a thoughtful frown. He shook his head. "I've got a headache."
Janet frowned. "A bad one?"
"I took some aspirin."
"How many?"
"Only two."
"Okay. About what happened this evening-"
"I don't want to talk about it," Michael interrupted.
"Michael, this afternoon you said you weren't going to argue with me anymore. Do you remember that?"
The boy hesitated, then nodded.
"It didn't last long, did it?"
He shook his head. "I guess not," he admitted.
"Didn't you mean what you said this afternoon?"
"Yes, but -" He faltered, then fell silent.
"But what?"
"But we always talked things over before we decided things. Now it seems like Grandpa is always deciding what we should do."
"I'm making the decisions," Janet corrected him. "Grandpa is giving me advice, but I'm making the decisions. And for a while, that's the way it's going to have to be. Once we're settled in our own house we can go back to the old way. But right now, there are too many decisions to be made, and too much to be done, and I just don't have the time to discuss it all with you. And I have to depend on you to understand that."
Michael fidgeted in the bed. "I do. It's just that-"
"That what?"
Michael's eyes fastened self-consciously on the ceiling. "Grandpa made me wash my mouth out with soap."
Janet tried to stifle her laugh, but failed. "Then maybe you won't talk back to him anymore."
"He said it was because of the way I was talking to you."
"Well, maybe it was a little bit of both. Anyway, it's not the end of the world. Lord knows, I survived a lot of mouth soapings."
"When you were eleven?"
And suddenly Janet knew what the real root of the problem was. "I don't think I got one much after I was ten," she said carefully. "But on the other hand, when I was eleven, I'd learned better than to talk back to my elders."
"But you and Dad always let me talk back to you. Even when I was little."
"So we did," Janet said softly. "But who's to say whether we were right or not? Anyway, if I were you, I'd be careful how I talked, at least until we move out of here and into our own place." She stood up, then bent over to kiss Michael goodnight. "How's the headache doing?"
"Still there."
"Well, go to sleep. It'll be gone by morning." She turned off the light on the nightstand, and a moment later was gone.
Michael lay in the darkness, trying to understand what was happening. Brushing his teeth twice had failed to remove the bitter residue of soap in his mouth, and the aspirin had done nothing to alleviate his headache. Furthermore, the smoky odor in the kitchen had followed him upstairs, and as he lay in bed he suddenly felt as if he couldn't breathe.
At last he got up and went to the window. The prairie was lit by a full moon, and as he looked out into the silvery glow of the night, he began to feel trapped by the confines of the house. If only he could go outside…
He knew he shouldn't. He should stay where he was and try to go to sleep. If his grandfather found out he'd snuck out in the middle of the night…
That was what made up his mind. There was something about doing what he knew he shouldn't do that made it more fun, that made an adventure out of practically anything. And besides, this wasn't New York. This was Prairie Bend, where no one ever even locked their doors, and the streets weren't filled with strange people. And he wasn't going to be in the streets, because it wasn't the streets that called him.
He pulled his jeans on, and a sweatshirt. Taking his shoes and socks with him, he slipped out of the bedroom and down the stairs, carefully avoiding the third one from the bottom, the one that creaked. He went out the back door, stopping on the porch to put on his socks and shoes. Then, not looking back at the house, he dashed across the yard and around the corner of the barn. He waited there, sure that if anybody'd heard him or seen him, they'd call him or come after him. But after a few seconds that seemed like hours, with the silence of the night still undisturbed, he moved away from the barn, across the freshly plowed field, toward the stand of cottonwoods that bordered the river.
As Janet watched the small figure of her son fade into the gloom of the night, her first instinct was, indeed, to go after him. She put on her robe, hurried down the stairs, and was about to go out the back door when she heard a movement in the depths of the house. A moment later Amos appeared in the kitchen.
"What's wrong?"
Janet shook her head. "It's nothing, really. It's just Michael. He-well, he seems to have decided to go for a walk."
Amos frowned. "In the middle of the night?"
"So it seems. I was just going to go after him-"
"You'll do nothing of the sort," Amos replied, his frown deepening. "In your condition, all you should be thinking about is getting a good night's sleep. I'll go after him myself."
He disappeared back toward his bedroom, and Janet sank down onto one of the kitchen chairs. But as she waited for him to dress, she began to change her mind. A few minutes later Amos returned, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt. Janet rose once again to her feet as he started out the back door.
"Amos? Maybe-well, maybe we should just leave him alone." The old man swung around, his eyes fixing on her.
"He probably just needs to be by himself and think things over," she said. "Let's give him some time, all right?"
Amos hesitated, his eyes narrowing. "If that's what you want. But he oughtn't to be going out in the middle of the night. It's not right."
"I know," Janet sighed. "And I can't say you're wrong. But just this once, can't we let it go? You go back to bed. Everything will be all right."
"Don't you want me to wait up with you 'til he gets back?"
Janet shook her head. "No."
There was a long silence, and then Amos nodded. "Okay. But I'll have a talk with him in the morning, and I'll see to it that he doesn't do this again."
A moment later he was gone, and Janet started slowly up the stairs to begin her vigil.
Waiting was harder than she'd thought it would be.
The air had shed the cold bite of the month before, but had not yet acquired the soggy heat that would blanket the plains in the days to come, when temperatures of ninety and more would hang over the prairie like a cloying shroud, suffocating people and animals alike with a dank heaviness that was even less bearable than the freeze of winter. Now, at the end of May, there was a briskness to the night air, and the musky odor of fresh-turned earth foretold of the crops that would soon begin to fill the fields. The night was crystal clear, and as he walked, aimlessly at first, Michael gazed up into the sky, picking out the Big Dipper, Orion, and the Little Dipper. Then he came to the stand of cottonwoods bordering the river, and he paused. There was a darkness among the trees, where the moonlight was blocked out by the leaves that had already sprouted from the heavily intertwined branches. No wonder they called it the Dismal, he thought. What little light spilled through from the pasture only lent the woods an eerie look, shadows cast upon shadows, with no easy path apparent.
Shivering, Michael set himself a destination now and began walking along the edges of the pastures, the woods on his right, climbing each fence as he came to it. Sooner than he would have expected, the woods curved away to the right, following the course of the river as it deviated from its southeastern flow to curl around the village. Ahead of him he could see the scattered twinkling lights of Prairie Bend. For a moment, he considered going into the village, but then, as he looked off to the southeast, he changed his mind, for there, seeming almost to glow in the moonlight, was the hulking shape of Findley's barn.