searching for something in the bags. Her hands were her eyes. Next to her the mare
cropped grasses and chewed, a hollow and leisured grinding to her right. Soon she found
a match and in its flare she glimpsed the forest floor, a strange and wicked-looking
topography. She saw her own skirts and the horse gawping over at her, its pupils
contracting, before the match stuttered and it was black again. Since her childhood,
which had ended not so long ago, she had wondered about the existence of goblins and
small, biting sprites. Her father had instilled this silliness in his girl, waking her
sometimes when he came home late and drunk. Over the objections of her grandmother, they
would go out into the dark garden as the child staggered and half-dreamed, and he would
seize her and point, insisting some tiny creature hid there, just out of sight, standing
motionless in the foliage. Incredible behaviour for a man of his nature and training, a
former Anglican minister, his collar now coiled and tucked away in a sock drawer.
Had the news of her crime reached him yet? She felt a wincing regret, for
she knew she could not go home to her father and grandmother, not now. That house was no
longerher home, and she would not be safe there. Even if she knew
her way, the least public route home, they would never hide or protect her when she
arrived.
The widow took up a pipe, which she had packed with tobacco, and drew the
embers up and sat back smoking in the gloom. She had taken this pipe from the old
manâs shrine; it was an expensive and antique object. The bowl was outsized and
ornate, carved into the shape of a stagâs head whose antlers came off in a hinged
lid. She drew up a fragrant smoke and sighed it back out.
FOR TWO DAYS , the widow and her mare climbed steaming
foothills into mountains whose peaks were seamed with impossible snow. The punishing
heat faded and the air became pleasantly warm. In the mornings heavy fog poured upward
from the earth and drifted in ghostly forms through the trees. She stared: This one is a
shepherdâs pipes, that one a womanâs hand reaching. She watched a gaggle of
vaporous forms trouble the surface of a little forest slough, and it gave her a curious
image of what her own mind endured. The voices. Furies born and soon dead with a simple
breath of sun; but potent while they lasted, and terrible.
At dusk the first day she came upon a lean-to built of rotted timber and
set against a mossy rock face. Slung across its open ends was canvas sacking that had
been eaten at the bottom by mould. She called out but no answer came, and so she
ventured close and threw back a flap to gaze upon decomposing blankets and a ratlike
strewing of blackened newspaper. No occupant rose up to greet her, no sign of life
anywhere. One folded wadge of newspaper in the corner had been underlined in black and
the lines had bled into oneanother. The widow had not slept in two
days, and before that never for more than a few hours. Here was a shelter, at dusk, a
human sign among the trees. And yet she backed away from this burrow as if from a
compost heap roiling with vermin. She wiped her hands on her own ragged dress. On the
ground about the hovel she found more refuse. Spoons, an empty wallet, a glove, more
newspaper, half-buried under pine needles and loam and none very far away from their
source. Like an archaeologist she unearthed a pitiful human sphere. She deemed it to be
male, though anyone following her and gazing at her rest spots might think the same of
her. The widow mounted and went on.
She rested that dusk and woke later to find all light erased. The night
was so dark she thought something stood between her eyes and the rest of the world.
Blindness could not be this complete. Nothing but the sound of wind through trees.
Somewhere to her left, the breathing horse. And high above, the slow funhouse creaking
of pine
Learning to Kill: Stories