“I reckon if it’s gonna jump us,” I said, “that’d be the place.”
“Then let’s don’t go there.”
“You want to go back across the bridge?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then we got to go on. We don’t know if he might have followed.”
“Did you see those horns on his head?”
“I seen somethin’. I think what we oughta do, least till we get through that bend in the trail there, is swap. You carry Toby and let me carry the shotgun.”
“I like the shotgun.”
“Yeah, but I can shoot it without it knocking me down. And I got the shells.”
Tom considered this. “Okay,” she said.
She put the shotgun on the ground and I gave her Toby. I picked up the gun and we started around the dark curve in the trail.
When we were in deep shadow nothing leaped out on us, but as we neared the moonlit part of the trail we heard movement in the woods. The same sort of movement we had heard back in the brambles. Something was pacing us again.
We reached the moonlit part of the trail and felt better. But there really wasn’t any reason for it. It was just a way of feeling. Moonlight didn’t change anything. I looked over my shoulder, into the darkness we had just left, and in the middle of the trail, covered in shadow, I could see it.
Standing there.
Watching.
I didn’t say anything to Tom about it. Instead I said, “You take the shotgun now, and I’ll take Toby. Then I want you to run with everything you got to where the road is.”
Tom, not being any dummy, and my eyes probably giving me away, turned and looked back in the shadows. She saw it too. It crossed into the woods. She turned, gave me Toby, took the shotgun, and took off like a scalded-ass ape.
I ran after her, bouncing poor Toby, the stringed squirrels slapping against my legs. Toby whined and whimpered and yelped. The trail widened, the moonlight grew brighter. The red-clay road came up. We leaped onto it, looked back.
Shadows and moonlight. Trees and the trail.
Nothing was after us. We didn’t hear anything moving in the woods.
“It okay now?” Tom asked.
“Guess so. They say he can’t come as far as the road.”
“What if he can?”
“Well, he can’t… I don’t think.”
“You think he killed that woman?”
“Figure he did.”
“How’d she get to lookin’ like that.”
“Somethin’ dead swells up like that. You know that.”
“How’d she get all cut? On his horns?”
“I don’t know, Tom.”
We went on down the road, and in time, after a number of rest stops, after helping Toby go to the bathroom by holding up his tail and legs, in the deepest part of the night, we reached home.
3
It wasn’t an altogether happy homecoming. The sky had grown cloudy and the moon was no longer bright. You could hear the cicadas chirping and frogs bleating off somewhere in the bottoms. When we entered into the yard carrying Toby, Daddy spoke from the shadows, and an owl, startled, flew up and was temporarily outlined against the faintly brighter sky.
“I ought to whup y’all’s butts,” Daddy said.
“Yes sir,” I said.
Daddy was sitting in a chair under an oak in the yard. It was sort of our gathering tree, where we sat and talked and shelled peas in the summer. He was smoking a pipe, a habit that would kill him later in life. I could see its glow as he puffed flames from a match into the tobacco. The smell from the pipe was woody and sour to me.
We went over and stood beneath the oak, near his chair.
“Your mother’s been worried sick,” he said. “Harry, you know better than to stay out like that, and with your sister. You’re supposed to take care of her.”
“Yes sir.”
“I see you still have Toby.”
“Yes sir. I think he’s doing better.”
“You don’t do better with a broken back.”
“He treed six squirrels,” I said. I took my pocketknife out and cut the string around my waist and presented him with the squirrels. He looked at them in the darkness, laid them beside his chair.
“You have an excuse,” he said.
“Yes sir,” I said.
“All right, then,” he said. “Tom, you go up to the house, get the tub and start filling it with water. It’s warm enough you won’t need to heat it. Not tonight. You get after them bugs with the kerosene and such, then bathe and hit the bed.”
“Yes sir,” she said. “But Daddy…”
“Go to the house, Tom,” Daddy said.
Tom looked at me, laid the shotgun on the ground, and went on toward the house.
Daddy puffed his pipe. “You said you had an excuse.”
“Yes sir. I got to runnin’ squirrels, but there’s something else. There’s a body down by the river.”
He leaned forward in his chair. “What?”
I told him everything that had happened. About being followed, the brambles, the body, the Goat Man. When I was finished, he sat silent for a time, then said, “There isn’t any Goat Man, Harry. But the person you saw, it’s possible he was the killer. You being out like that, it could have been you or Tom that he got.”
“Yes sir.”
“Suppose I’ll have to take a look early morning. You think you can find her again?”
“Yes sir, but I don’t want to.”
“I know, but I’m gonna need your help.”
Daddy took his pipe and knocked out the ash on the bottom of his shoe and put the pipe in his pocket. “You go up to the house now, and when Tom gets through, you get the bugs off of you and wash up. I know you’re covered. Hand me the shotgun and I’ll take care of Toby.”
I started to say something, but I didn’t know what to say. Daddy got up, cradled Toby in his arms, and I put the shotgun in his hand.
“Damn rotten thing to happen to a good dog,” he said.
Daddy started walking off toward the little barn we had out back of the house by the field.
“Daddy,” I said. “I couldn’t do it. Not Toby.”
“That’s all right, son,” he said, and went on out to the barn.
When I got up to the house, Tom was on the back screened porch, what we called a sleeping porch. It wasn’t real big, but it was comfortable in the summer. There was a swinging seat held by chains to the beams, and there were two pallet beds and a tin tub that hung on the wall till it was needed.
Like right then. Tom was in the tin tub and Mama was scrubbing her hard and fast by the light of a lantern hanging on a porch beam directly above them.
When I came up, Mama, who was in an old green dress, barefoot, her sleeves rolled up, was on her knees. As I came through the screen from the outside, she looked over her shoulder at me. Her raven black hair was gathered up in a fat bun and a tendril of it had come loose and was hanging across her forehead and eye. She pushed it aside with a soapy hand, looked at me.
I didn’t understand it then, her being my mother and all, but any time I looked at her I found myself staring. There was something about her that made you want to keep your eyes on her face. I had just begun to have a hint of what it was. Mother was pretty. Years later I was to learn that many thought her the most beautiful woman in the county, and looking back on the handful of photos I have of her then, and even into her sixties, I would have to say that such an evaluation was most likely true.
“You ought to know better than to stay out this late. And scaring Tom with stories about seeing a body.”
“I wasn’t all that scared,” Tom said.
“Hush, Tom,” Mama said.
“I wasn’t.”
“I said hush.”
“It ain’t a story, Mama,” I said.
I told her about it, making it brief.
When I finished, she asked, “Where’s your Daddy?”
“He took Toby out to the barn. Toby’s back is broken.”
“I heard. I’m real sorry.”
I listened for the blast of the shotgun, but after fifteen minutes it still hadn’t come. Then I heard Daddy coming down from the barn, and pretty soon he stepped out of the shadows, onto the porch and into the lantern light. He was carrying the shotgun, smoking his pipe.