Chapter 43: Elias Remembers

We did not go to the trailer that night. We went up the ridge to Maeve's with the casing in my pocket and the letters in my jacket and the snow coming down again, and by the time we got to the cottage the road behind us was white and there was no sign that anyone had walked it.

Maeve had the stove going and the kettle on. Arthur Renn was asleep in the chair by the fire with the record on his knees and his spectacles still on his face. Silas was at the table with a candle and a page of notes and his arm out of the sling because the sling had begun to smell.

Dale was sitting in the corner with a blanket around his shoulders and his hands in his lap.

I had forgotten he was there. I stood in the doorway with the snow on my boots and looked at him and he looked at me.

“I have been thinking,” he said. “About the field. About the night it happened.”

“Not tonight,” I said.

“Yes, tonight.” He sat forward. “I have been sitting in this corner for six hours with nothing to do but think, and there is a thing I have been trying not to remember, and I am going to say it now because I do not know if I will have the nerve tomorrow.” He took a breath. “When I went out to that field I had a lantern and I had the knife. I told you that. What I did not tell you is that I stopped on the mill road before I got to the field because there was a light in the trees.”

The kitchen went quiet.

“A light,” I said.

“A lantern. Small and low, the way a man carries a lantern when he does not want to be seen from the road. It was in the trees on the north side of the road, about a hundred yards from the wall, and it went out when I stopped the truck.” Dale looked at the fire. “I sat in the truck for a minute and I told myself it was a hunter or a warden or a farmer out after a calf. And then I got out and I went into the field and I did what I did, and when it was over I looked at those trees and there was nothing there. But there had been a light.”

Elias was standing by the stove with his coat still on.

“Was it before or after you went into the field?” he said.

“Before. It was before.” Dale looked up. “Why?”

Elias did not answer. He went to the window and stood there with his back to the room and his hand on the frame.

“Elias,” I said.

“I need to think,” he said.

Nobody spoke. The stove ticked and the wind came down the chimney and made the fire move. June came in from the back room with a blanket around her shoulders and her hair down and stopped in the doorway when she saw all of us standing there.

“What happened?” she said.

“Nothing yet,” I said.

Elias turned around.

“It was the new moon,” he said. “That is what I keep coming back to. It was the new moon and I was in the field and I was not myself.” He came and sat down at the table. “I have been trying to remember it properly since the night in the circle. Before that I only had pieces. The smell of the blood and the sound of the voice and the scars in the morning. But in the circle I remembered the whole night, and I have been going over it since, and there are things in it that I have not told you.”

I sat down across from him.

“Tell me all of it,” I said.

He put his hands flat on the table.

“I woke up in the field behind the mill road,” he said. “That is where the new moon put me. It was dark and I was on four legs and the grass was up to my chest, and the first thing I knew was that there was blood on the ground. Not mine. It was forty feet away and it was fresh and it was wolf blood and I could smell it the way you smell a fire.” He looked at the table. “I went to it. I did not want to. The wolf in me went to it because that is what a wolf does when there is blood on the ground, and I found your brother.”

June put her hand over her mouth.

“He was on his back,” Elias said. “His coat was open and his shirt was open and there was a wound in his chest and he was still breathing. It was not a big wound. That is the thing I have never been able to say to anyone. It was not a big wound. It was a small clean cut under the collarbone, and it was bleeding slow, and if there had been a healer in that field he might have lived.”

I could not breathe.

“And there was a man standing over him,” Elias said.

“You told me that,” I said. “You told me about the lantern and the coat with the collar up.”

“I told you there was a man and I told you he ran,” Elias said. “What I did not tell you is that he did not run right away. He stood there for a long time. He stood there and looked at your brother on the ground and he did not move, and then he knelt down.”

Dale sat up in the corner.

“He knelt down,” he said. “That is not what I did. I did not kneel down.”

“You did,” Elias said. “I was forty feet away in the grass and I saw you kneel down beside him and I saw you put your hand on his chest. And then you stood up and you picked up the lantern and you walked to the truck.” He looked at Dale. “I have been trying to make that fit for four months. A man who kills another man does not kneel down beside him and put his hand on his chest. A man who is sorry does that. A man who has just done a thing by accident does that.”

Dale was very pale.

“I did kneel down,” he said. “I had forgotten. I knelt down and I put my hand on his chest and I could feel his heart going and I told him I was sorry. And then I got up and I ran.” He put his face in his hands. “I left him there. He was alive and I left him there.”

“He was alive when you left,” Elias said. “And then he was not.”

Nobody said anything for a while.

“What did you do?” I said to Elias. “You were in the grass forty feet away. What did you do?”

Elias looked at me.

“I went to him,” he said. “After Dale was gone. I came out of the grass and I went to him and I put my hands on the wound and I tried to hold it shut.”

“You told me that,” I said. “You told me that the first night in the co-op.”

“I did,” he said. “And it is true. But there is more of it and I have not told you because I did not know how to say it without sounding like a madman.” He took a breath. “When I put my hands on him, the wound stopped bleeding. Not all at once. It slowed down and then it stopped, and the skin under my hands went warm, and your brother opened his eyes.”

The kitchen was so quiet that I could hear the fire eating the wood.

“He opened his eyes,” I said.

“He looked at me,” Elias said. “He was not afraid. He looked at me like a man who had been waiting for someone to come, and he said a name, and then he said my sister, and then he said the field, and then he stopped.” He looked at me. “I have carried those words for four months. I have carried his death and his scars and his last three words, and I did not know what they meant until tonight.”

“What name?” I said.

Elias looked at Dale.

“It was not his name,” he said. “It was a name I have never heard in this county. He said it twice and then he said my sister and then he said the field and then he was gone.”

I sat very still.

“Say the name,” I said.

“I cannot,” Elias said. “I have tried to say it a hundred times and it will not come out of my mouth. It is a thing the curse took from me. I can remember the sound of it and I cannot make it.” He put his hand on his own throat. “But I know where it is. I know where the name is written down. Your brother wrote it in the mill wall.”

I stood up.

“What?”

“The wall in the room under the loft,” Elias said. “The room with the tally marks and the drawings. There is writing on the boards behind the bed. I saw it when we were up there and I did not read it because I was looking at the box. It is a name and a date and a line of numbers and it is in your brother’s hand. I know his hand from the co-op tickets.”

Dale was on his feet.

“I am coming with you,” he said.

“No,” I said.

“Wren.”

“You are the man who put a knife in my brother’s chest and left him in a field,” I said. “You are not coming to the mill to read his last words.”

He stood there in the firelight with the blanket around his shoulders and did not say anything, and I put my coat on and went to the door.

June was already in her coat.

“Not you either,” I said.

“I am coming,” June said. “He was my brother too.”

The wind was against us all the way down the ridge and the snow was up to our ankles and the mill road was a white line in the dark. The mill stood at the end of it with its broken door and its tin roof, and there was a light in the window of the room under the loft.

I stopped in the road.

“That light is not ours,” I said.