Текст книги "The Wind Through the Keyhole"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE

Once upon a bye, long before your grandfather’s grandfather was born, on the edge of an unexplored wilderness called the Endless Forest, there lived a boy named Tim with his mother, Nell, and his father, Big Ross. For a time the three of them lived happily enough, although they owned little.

“I have only four things to pass on to you,” Big Ross told his son, “but four’s enough. Can you say them to me, young boy?”

Tim had said them to him many and many-a, but never tired of it. “Thy ax, thy lucky coin, thy plot, and thy place, which is as good as the place of any king or gunslinger in Mid-World.” He would then pause and add, “My mama, too. That makes five.”

Big Ross would laugh and kiss the boy’s brow as he lay in his bed, for this catechism usually came at the end of the day. Behind them, in the doorway, Nell waited to put her kiss on top of her husband’s. “Aye,” Big Ross would say, “we must never forget Mama, for wi’out her, all’s for naught.”

So Tim would go off to sleep, knowing he was loved, and knowing he had a place in the world, and listening to the night wind slip its strange breath over the cottage: sweet with the scent of the blossiewood at the edge of the Endless Forest, and faintly sour—but still pleasant—with the smell of the ironwood trees deeper in, where only brave men dared go.

Those were good years, but as we know—from stories and from life—the good years never last long.

One day, when Tim was eleven, Big Ross and his partner, Big Kells, drove their wagons down Main Road to where the Ironwood Trail entered the forest, as they did every morning save the seventh, when all in the village of Tree rested. On this day, however, only Big Kells came back. His skin was sooty and his jerkin charred. There was a hole in the left leg of his homespun pants. Red and blistered flesh peeped through it. He slumped on the seat of his wagon, as if too weary to sit up straight.

Nell Ross came to the door of her house and cried, “Where is Big Ross? Where is my husband?”

Big Kells shook his head slowly from side to side. Ash sifted out of his hair and onto his shoulders. He spoke only a single word, but one was enough to turn Tim’s knees to water. His mother began to shriek.

The word was dragon.

No one living today has ever seen the like of the Endless Forest, for the world has moved on. It was dark and full of dangers. The woodsmen of Tree Village knew it better than anyone in Mid-World, and even they knew nothing of what might live or grow ten wheels beyond the place where the blossie groves ended and the ironwood trees—those tall, brooding sentinels—began. The great depths were a mystery filled with strange plants, stranger animals, stinking weirdmarshes, and—so ’twas said—leavings of the Old People that were often deadly.

The folken of Tree feared the Endless Forest, and rightly so; Big Ross wasn’t the first woodsman who went down Ironwood Trail and did not come back. Yet they loved it, too, for ’twas ironwood fed and clothed their families. They understood (though none would have said so aloud) that the forest was alive. And, like all living things, it needed to eat.

Imagine that you were a bird flying above that great tract of wildland. From up there it might look like a giant dress of a green so dark it was almost black. Along the bottom of the dress was a hem of lighter green. These were the blossiewood groves. Just below the blossies, at the farthest edge of North’rd Barony, was the village of Tree. It was the last town in what was then a civilized country. Once Tim asked his father what civilized meant.

“Taxes,” Big Ross said, and laughed—but not in a funny way.

Most of the woodsmen went no farther than the blossie groves. Even there, sudden dangers could arise. Snakes were the worst, but there were also poisonous rodents called wervels that were the size of dogs. Many men had been lost in the blossies over the years, but on the whole, blossie was worth the risk. It was a lovely fine-grained wood, golden in color and almost light enough to float on air. It made fine lake and rivercraft, but was no good for sea travel; even a moderate gale would tear apart a boat made of blossie.

For sea travel ironwood was wanted, and ironwood brought a high price from Hodiak, the barony buyer who came twice a year to the Tree sawmill. It was ironwood that gave the Endless Forest its green-black hue, and only the bravest woodsmen dared go after it, for there were dangers along the Ironwood Trail—which barely pierced the skin of the Endless Forest, remember—that made the snakes, wervels, and mutie bees of the blossie groves seem mild by comparison.

Dragons, for instance.

So it was that in his eleventh year, Tim Ross lost his da’. Now there was no ax and no lucky coin hanging around Big Ross’s burly neck on its fine silver chain. Soon there might be no plot in the village or place in the world, either. For in those days, when the time of Wide Earth came around, the Barony Covenanter came with it. He carried a scroll of parchment paper, and the name of every family in Tree was writ upon it, along with a number. That number was the amount of tax. If you could pay it—four or six or eight silver knucks, even a gold one for the largest of the freeholds—all was well. If you couldn’t, the Barony took your plot and you were turned out on the land. There was no appeal.

Tim went half-days to the cottage of the Widow Smack, who kept school and was paid in food—usually vegetables, sometimes a bit of meat. Long ago, before the bloodsores had come on her and eaten off half her face (so the children whispered, although none had actually seen it), she had been a great lady in the barony estates far away (or so the children’s elders claimed, although none actually knew). Now she wore a veil and taught likely lads, and even a few lassies, how to read and practice the slightly questionable art known as mathmatica.

She was a fearsomely smart woman who took no guff, and most days she was tireless. Her pupils usually came to love her in spite of her veil, and the horrors they imagined might lie beneath it. But on occasion she would begin to tremble all over, and cry that her poor head was splitting, and that she must lie down. On these days she would send the children home, sometimes commanding them to tell their parents that she regretted nothing, least of all her beautiful prince.

Sai Smack had one of her fugues about a month after the dragon burned Big Ross to ashes, and when Tim came back to his cottage, which was called Goodview, he looked in the kitchen window and saw his mother crying with her head on the table.

He dropped the slate with his mathmatica problems on it (long division, which he had feared but turned out to be only backwards multiplication) and rushed to her side. She looked up at him and tried to smile. The contrast between her upturned lips and her streaming eyes made Tim feel like crying himself. It was the look of a woman at the end of her tether.

“What is it, Mama? What’s wrong?”

“Just thinking of your father. Sometimes I miss him so. Why are you home early?”

He began to tell her, but stopped when he saw the leather purse with the drawstring top. She had put one of her arms over it, as if to hide it from him, and when she saw him looking, she swept it off the table and into her lap.

Now Tim was far from a stupid boy, so he made tea before saying anything else. When she had drunk some—with sugar, which he insisted she take, although there was little enough left in the pot—and had calmed, he asked her what else was wrong.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Why were you counting our money?”

“What little there is to count,” said she. “Covenant Man will be here once Reaptide’s gone—aye, while the embers of the bonfire are still hot, if I know his ways—and what then? He’ll want six silver knuckles this year, p’raps as many as eight, for taxes have gone up, so they do say, probably another of their stupid wars somewhere far from here, soldiers with their banners flying, aye, very fine.”

“How much do we have?”

“Four and a scrap of a fifth. We have no livestock to sell, nor a single round of ironwood since your father died. What shall we do?” She began to cry again. “What shall we do?”

Tim was as frightened as she was, but since there was no man to comfort her, he held his own tears back and put his arms around her and soothed her as best he could.

“If we had his ax and his coin, I’d sell them to Destry,” she said at last.

Tim was horrified even though the ax and lucky coin were gone, burned in the same fiery blast that had taken their cheerful, goodhearted owner. “You never would!”

“Aye. To keep his plot and his place, I would. Those were the things he truly cared about, and thee, and me. Could he speak he’d say ‘Do it, Nell, and welcome,’ for Destry has hard coin.” She sighed. “But then would come old Barony Covenant Man next year . . . and the year after that . . .” She put her hands over her face. “Oh, Tim, we shall be turned out on the land, and there’s not one thing I can think to change it. Can you?”

Tim would have given everything he owned (which was very little) to be able to give her an answer, but he could not. He could only ask how long it would be before the Covenant Man would appear in Tree on his tall black horse, sitting astride a saddle worth more than Big Ross had made in twenty-five years of risking his life on that narrow track known as the Ironwood Trail.

She held up four fingers. “This many weeks if the weather is fair.” She held up four more. “This many if it’s foul, and he’s held up in the farming villages of the Middles. Eight is the most we can hope for, I think. And then . . .”

“Something will happen before he comes,” Tim said. “Da’ always said that the forest gives to them that love it.”

“All I’ve ever seen it do is take,” said Nell, and covered her face again. When he tried to put an arm around her, she shook her head.

Tim trudged out to get his slate. He had never felt so sad and frightened. Something will happen to change it, he thought. Please let something happen to change it.

The worst thing about wishes is that sometimes they come true.

That was a rich Full Earth in Tree; even Nell knew it, although the ripe land was bitter in her eye. The following year she and Tim might be following the crops with burlap rucksacks on their backs, farther and farther from the Endless Forest, and that made summer’s beauty hard to look at. The forest was a terrible place, and it had taken her man, but it was the only place she had ever known. At night, when the wind blew from the north, it stole to her bed through her open window like a lover, bringing its own special smell, one both bitter and sweet, like blood and strawberries. Sometimes when she slept, she dreamed of its deep tilts and secret corridors, and of sunshine so diffuse that it glowed like old green brass.

The smell of the forest when the wind’s out of the north brings visions, the old folken said. Nell didn’t know if this was true or just chimneycorner blather, but she knew the smell of the Endless Forest was the smell of life as well as death. And she knew that Tim loved it as his father had. As she herself had (although often against her will).

She had secretly feared the day when the boy would grow tall enough and strong enough to go down that dangerous trail with his da’, but now she found herself sorry that day would never come. Sai Smack and her mathmatica were all very well, but Nell knew what her son truly wanted, and she hated the dragon that had stolen it from him. Probably it had been a she-dragon, and only protecting her egg, but Nell hated it just the same. She hoped the plated yellow-eyed bitch would swallow her own fire, as the old stories said they sometimes did, and explode.

One day not so many after Tim had arrived home early and found her in tears, Big Kells came calling on Nell. Tim had gotten two weeks’ work helping farmer Destry with the hay-cutting, so she was by her onesome in her garden, weeding on her knees. When she saw her late husband’s friend and partner, she got to her feet and wiped her dirty hands on the burlap apron she called her weddiken.

A single look at his clean hands and carefully trimmed beard was enough to tell her why he’d come. Once upon a bye, Nell Robertson, Jack Ross, and Bern Kells had been children together, and great pals. Littermates from different litters, people of the village sometimes said when they saw the three together; in those days they were inseparable.

When they grew to young manhood, both boys fancied her. And while she loved them both, it was Big Ross she burned for, Big Ross she’d wed and taken to bed (although whether that was the order of it no one knew, nor really cared). Big Kells had taken it as well as any man can. He stood beside Ross at the wedding, and slipped the silk around them for their walk back down the aisle when the preacher was done. When Kells took it off them at the door (although it never really comes off, so they do say), he kissed them both and wished them a lifetime of long days and pleasant nights.

Although the afternoon Kells came to her in the garden was hot, he was wearing a broadcloth jacket. From the pocket he took a loosely knotted length of silk rope, as she knew he would. A woman knows. Even if she’s long married, a woman knows, and Kells’s heart had never changed.

“Will’ee?” he asked. “If’ee will, I’ll sell my place to Old Destry—he wants it, for it sits next to his east field—and keep this’un. Covenant Man’s coming, Nellie, and he’ll have his hand out. With no man, how’ll’ee fill it?”

“I cannot, as thee knows,” said she.

“Then tell me—shall we slip the rope?”

She wiped her hands nervously on her weddiken, although they were already as clean as they’d be without water from the creek. “I . . . I need to think about it.”

“What’s to think about?” He took his bandanna—neatly folded in his pocket instead of tied loosely, woodsman-style, around his neck—and mopped his forehead with it. “Either’ee do and we go on in Tree as we always have—I’ll find the boy something to work at that’ll bring in a little, although he’s far too wee for the woods—or ye and he’ll go on the land. I can share, but I can’t give, much as I might like to. I have only one place to sell, kennit.”

She thought, He’s trying to buy me to fill the empty side of the bed that Millicent left behind. But that seemed an unworthy thought for a man she’d known long before he was a man, and one who had worked for years by her beloved husband’s side in the dark and dangerous trees near the end of the Ironwood Trail. One to watch and one to work, the oldtimers said. Pull together and never apart. Now that Jack Ross was gone, Bern Kells was asking her to pull with him. It was natural.

Yet she hesitated.

“Come tomorrow at this same time, if you still have a mind,” Nell told him. “I’ll give thee an answer then.”

He didn’t like it; she saw he didn’t like it; she saw something in his eyes that she had occasionally glimpsed when she had been a green girl sparked by two likely lads and the envy of all her friends. That look was what caused her to hesitate, even though he had appeared like an angel, offering her—and Tim, of course—a way out of the terrible dilemma that had come with Big Ross’s death.

Perhaps he saw her seeing it, for he dropped his gaze. He studied his feet for a bit, and when he looked up again, he was smiling. It made him almost as handsome as he’d been as a youth . . . but never so handsome as Jack Ross.

“Tomorrow, then. But no longer. They have a saying in the West’rds, my dear. ‘Look not long at what’s offered, for every precious thing has wings and may fly away.’”

She washed at the edge of the creek, stood smelling the sweet-sour aroma of the forest for a bit, then went inside and lay down upon her bed. It was unheard of for Nell Ross to be horizontal while the sun was still in the sky, but she had much to think of and much to remember from those days when two young woodsmen had vied for her kisses.

Even if her blood had called toward Bern Kells (not yet Big Kells in those days, although his father was dead, slain in the woods by a vurt or some such nightmare) instead of Jack Ross, she wasn’t sure she would have slipped the rope with him. Kells was good-humored and laughing when he was sober, and as steady as sand through a glass, but he could be angry and quick with his fists when he was drunk. And he was drunk often in those days. His binges grew longer and more frequent after Ross and Nell were wed, and on many occasions he woke up in jail.

Jack had borne it awhile, but after a binge where Kells had destroyed most of the furniture in the saloon before passing out, Nell told her husband something had to be done. Big Ross reluctantly agreed. He got his partner and old friend out of jail—as he had many times before—but this time he spoke to him frankly instead of just telling Kells to go jump in the creek and stay there until his head was clear.

“Listen to me, Bern, and with both ears. You’ve been my friend since I could toddle, and my pard since we were old enough to go past the blossie and into the ironwood on our own. You’ve watched my back and I’ve watched yours. There’s not a man I trust more, when you’re sober. But once you pour the redeye down your throat, you’re no more reliable than quickmud. I can’t go into the forest alone, and everything I have—everything we both have—is at risk if I can’t depend on’ee. I’d hate to cast about for a new pard, but fair warning: I have a wife and a kiddy on the way, and I’ll do what I have to do.”

Kells continued his drinking, brawling, and bawding for a few more months, as if to spite his old friend (and his old friend’s new wife). Big Ross was on the verge of severing their partnership when the miracle happened. It was a small miracle, hardly more than five feet from toes to crown, and her name was Millicent Redhouse. What Bern Kells would not do for Big Ross, he did for Milly. When she died in childbirth six seasons later (and the babby soon after—even before the flush of labor had faded from the poor woman’s dead cheek, the midwife confided to Nell), Ross was gloomy.

“He’ll go back for the drink now, and gods know what will become of him.”

But Big Kells stayed sober, and when his business happened to bring him into the vicinity of Gitty’s Saloon, he crossed to the other side of the street. He said it had been Milly’s dying request, and to do otherwise would be an insult to her memory. “I’ll die before I take another drink,” he said.

He had kept this promise . . . but Nell sometimes felt his eyes upon her. Often, even. He had never touched her in a way that could be called intimate, or even forward, had never stolen so much as a Reaptide kiss, but she felt his eyes. Not as a man looks at a friend, or at a friend’s wife, but as a man looks at a woman.

Tim came home an hour before sunset with hay stuck to every visible inch of his sweaty skin, but happy. Farmer Destry had paid him in scrip for the town store, a fairish sum, and his goodwife had added a sack of her sweet peppers and busturd tomatoes. Nell took the scrip and the sack, thanked him, kissed him, gave him a well-stuffed popkin, and sent him down to the spring to bathe.

Ahead of him, as he stood in the cold water, ran the dreaming, mist-banded fields toward the Inners and Gilead. To his left bulked the forest, which began less than a wheel away. In there it was twilight even at noonday, his father had said. At the thought of his father, his happiness at being paid a man’s wages (or almost) for a day’s work ran out of him like grain from a sack with a hole in it. This sorrow came often, but it always surprised him. He sat for a while on a big rock with his knees drawn up to his chest and his head cradled in his arms. To be taken by a dragon so close to the edge of the forest was unlikely and terribly unfair, but it had happened before. His father wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last.

His mother’s voice came floating to him over the fields, calling him to come in and have some real supper. Tim called cheerily back to her, then knelt on the rock to splash cold water on his eyes, which felt swollen, although he had shed no tears. He dressed quickly and trotted up the slope. His mother had lit the lamps, for the gloaming had come, and they cast long rectangles of light across her neat little garden. Tired but happy again—for boys turn like weathercocks, so they do—Tim hurried into the welcoming glow of home.

When the meal was done and the few dishes ridded between them, Nell said: “I’d talk to you mother to son, Tim . . . and a bit more. You’re old enough to work a little now, you’ll soon be leaving your childhood behind—sooner than I’d like—and you deserve a say in what happens.”

“Is it about the Covenant Man, Mama?”

“In a way, but I . . . I think more than that.” She came close to saying I fear instead of I think, but why would she? There was a hard decision to be made, an important decision, but what was there to fear?

She led the way into their sitting room—so cozy Big Ross had almost been able to touch the opposing walls when he stood in the middle with his arms outstretched—and there, as they sat before the cold hearth (for it was a warm Full Earth night), she told him all that had passed between Big Kells and herself. Tim listened with surprise and mounting unease.

“So,” Nell said when she had finished. “What does thee think?” But before he could answer—perhaps she saw in his face the worry she felt in her own heart—she rushed on. “He’s a good man, and was more brother than mate to your da’. I believe he cares for me, and cares for thee.”

No, thought Tim, I’m just what comes in the same saddlebag. He never even looks at me. Unless I happened to be with Da’, that is. Or with you.

“Mama, I don’t know.” The thought of Big Kells in the house—lying next to Mama in his da’s place—made him feel light in his stomach, as if his supper had not set well. In truth, it no longer was sitting well.

“He’s quit the drink,” she said. Now she seemed to be talking to herself instead of to him. “Years ago. He could be wild as a youth, but your da’ tamed him. And Millicent, of course.”

“Maybe, but neither of them is here anymore,” Tim pointed out. “And Ma, he hasn’t found anyone yet to partner him on the Ironwood. He goes a-cutting on his own, and that’s dead risky.”

“It’s early days yet,” she said. “He’ll find someone to partner up with, for he’s strong and he knows where the good stands are. Your father showed him how to find them when they were both fresh to the work, and they have fine stakeouts near the place where the trail ends.”

Tim knew this was so, but was less sure Kells would find someone to partner with. He thought the other woodcutters kept clear of him. They seemed to do it without knowing they were doing it, the way a seasoned woodsman would detour around a poisonthorn bush, even if he only saw it from the corner of his eye.

Maybe I’m only making that up, he thought.

“I don’t know,” he said again. “A rope that’s slipped in church can’t be unslipped.”

Nell laughed nervously. “Where in Full Earth did thee hear that?”

“From you,” Tim said.

She smiled. “Yar, p’raps thee did, for my mouth’s hung in the middle and runs at both ends. We’ll sleep on it, and see clearer in the morning.”

But neither of them slept much. Tim lay wondering what it would be like to have Big Kells as a steppa. Would he be good to them? Would he take Tim into the forest with him to begin learning the woodsman’s life? That would be fine, he thought, but would his mother want him going into the line of work that had killed her husband? Or would she want him to stay south of the Endless Forest? To be a farmer?

I like Destry well enough, he thought, but I’d never in life be a farmer. Not with the Endless Forest so close, and so much of the world to see.

Nell lay a wall away, with her own uncomfortable thoughts. Mostly she wondered what their lives would be like if she refused Kells’s offer and they were turned out on the land, away from the only place they’d ever known. What their lives would be like if the Barony Covenanter rode up on his tall black horse and they had nothing to give him.

The next day was even hotter, but Big Kells came wearing the same broadcloth coat. His face was red and shining. Nell told herself she didn’t smell graf on his breath, and if she did, what of it? ’Twas only hard cider, and any man might take a drink or two before going to hear a woman’s decision. Besides, her mind was made up. Or almost.

Before he could ask his question, she spoke boldly. As boldly as she was able, anyhap. “My boy reminds me that a rope slipped in church can’t be unslipped.”

Big Kells frowned, although whether it was the mention of the boy or the marriage-loop that fashed him, she could not tell. “Aye, and what of that?”

“Only will you be good to Tim and me?”

“Aye, good as I can be.” His frown deepened. She couldn’t tell if it was anger or puzzlement. She hoped for puzzlement. Men who could cut and chop and dare beasts in the deep wood often found themselves lost in affairs like this, she knew, and at the thought of Big Kells lost, her heart opened to him.

“Set your word on it?” she asked.

The frown eased. White flashed in his neatly trimmed black beard as he smiled. “Aye, by watch and by warrant.”

“Then I say yes.”

And so they were wed. That is where many stories end; it’s where this one—sad to say—really begins.

There was graf at the wedding reception, and for a man who no longer drank spirits, Big Kells tossed a goodly amount down his gullet. Tim viewed this with unease, but his mother appeared not to notice. Another thing that made Tim uneasy was how few of the other woodsmen showed up, although it was Ethday. If he had been a girl instead of a boy, he might have noticed something else. Several of the women whom Nell counted among her friends were looking at her with expressions of guarded pity.

That night, long after midnight, he was awakened by a thump and a cry that might have been part of a dream, but it seemed to come through the wall from the room his mother now shared (true, but not yet possible to believe) with Big Kells. Tim lay listening, and had almost dropped off to sleep again when he heard quiet weeping. This was followed by the voice of his new steppa, low and gruff: “Shut it, can’t you? You ain’t a bit hurt, there’s no blood, and I have to be up with the birdies.”

The sounds of crying stopped. Tim listened, but there was no more talk. Shortly after Big Kells’s snores began, he fell asleep. The next morning, while she was at the stove frying eggs, Tim saw a bruise on his mother’s arm above the inside of her elbow.

“It’s nothing,” Nell said when she saw him looking. “I had to get up in the night to do the necessary, and bumped it on the bedpost. I’ll have to get used to finding my way in the dark again, now that I’m not alone.”

Tim thought, Yar—that’s what I’m afraid of.

When the second Ethday of his married life came round, Big Kells took Tim with him to the house that now belonged to Baldy Anderson, Tree’s other big farmer. They went in Kells’s wood-wagon. The mules stepped lightly with no rounds or strakes of ironwood to haul; today there were only a few little piles of sawdust in the back of the wagon. And that lingering sweet-sour smell, of course, the smell of the deep woods. Kells’s old place looked sad and abandoned with its shutters closed and the tall, unscythed grass growing up to the splintery porch slats.

“Once I get my gunna out’n it, let Baldy take it all for kindling, do it please ’im,” Kells grunted. “Fine wi’ me.”

As it turned out, there were only two things he wanted from the house—a dirty old footrest and a large leather trunk with straps and a brass lock. This was in the bedroom, and Kells stroked it as if it were a pet. “Can’t leave this,” he said. “Never this. ’Twas my father’s.”

Tim helped him get it outside, but Kells had to do most of the work. The trunk was very heavy. When it was in the wagonbed, Big Kells leaned over with his hands on the knees of his newly (and neatly) mended trousers. At last, when the purple patches began to fade from his cheeks, he stroked the trunk again, and with a gentleness Tim had as yet not seen applied to his mother. “All I own stowed in one trunk. As for the house, did Baldy pay the price I should have had?” He looked at Tim challengingly, as if expecting an argument on this subject.

“I don’t know,” Tim said cautiously. “Folk say sai Anderson’s close.”

Kells laughed harshly. “Close? Close? Tight as a virgin’s cootchie is what he is. Nar, nar, I got crumbs instead of a slice, for he knew I couldn’t afford to wait. Help me tie up this tailboard, boy, and be not sluggardly.”

Tim was not sluggardly. He had his side of the tailboard roped tight before Kells had finished tying his in a sloppy ollie-knot that would have made his father laugh. When he was finally done, Big Kells gave his trunk another of those queerly affectionate caresses.

“All in here now, all I have. Baldy knew I had to have silver before Wide Earth, didn’t he? Old You Know Who is coming, and he’ll have his hand out.” He spat between his old scuffed boots. “This is all your ma’s fault.”

“Ma’s fault? Why? Didn’t you want to marry her?”

“Watch your mouth, boy.” Kells looked down, seemed surprised to see a fist where his hand had been, and opened his fingers. “You’re too young to understand. When you’re older, you’ll find out how women can get the good of a man. Let’s go on back.”

Halfway to the driving seat, he stopped and looked across the stowed trunk at the boy. “I love yer ma, and that’s enough for you to be going on with.”

And as the mules trotted up the village high street, Big Kells sighed and added, “I loved yer da’, too, and how I miss ’im. ’Tain’t the same wi’out him beside me in the woods, or seein Misty and Bitsy up the trail ahead of me.”

At this Tim’s heart opened a little to the big, slump-shouldered man with the reins in his hands—in spite of himself, really—but before the feeling had any chance to grow, Big Kells spoke again.