Free The Right Hand of Sleep by John Wray Page A

did you happen east, then, little soldier? she asked me.
    By accident, ma’am, I said, buttering a roll and smiling.
    I know better, she said coyly.
    What do you mean, please? said one of the Czechs. I looked up at the farmer’s wife. Excuse me, ma’am? I said, my mouth full of bread.
    She laughed, taking us all in with her sparkling black eyes. Come come, gentlemen! We’re not so far as all that from the city. This country is very flat, she said, winking at her husband. News gets about.
    I still don’t understand, I protested.
    She shrugged. There’s a big strike tomorrow, in favor of the Seven Points. In Dzizny Square. Surely you knew about this? My husband will be going, and my sons. You may ride with them. To save yourself the marching, she said, breaking again into a grin.
    I still sat staring at her blankly. Strike? I said.
    The Bolsheviks, the farmer said loudly. The Bolsheviks, good gentlemens.
    It was the first time many of us had heard that word.
    The whining of the door hinges woke him early the next morning. The room was bright and cold. Bits of straw he’d missed in the night danced in spirals on the knotted clapboard floor and around the little table. The last of the fire had long since burned to ash and he felt small and frozen on the bed. He went to the stove and built another fire, shut the door and put on his coat and took out the provisions he’d bought at the farm and boiled some water and made a pot of coffee. He drank two scalding cups and felt the cold in his hands and legs slowly receding. Then he stood and crossed the room to the open locker.
    In the locker were twenty-five rounds of bullets and a large box of shells for the shotgun. The shotgun and the rifle were both filthy with grease and the rifle’s stock was badly pocked with shot holes. The fly rods, by contrast, looked pristine and chaste bundled carefully in cotton sheeting in a separate compartment. The flies were packed in narrow cork boxes, one to each box, and gave no sign of ever having been used. They shone against the mute brown of the cork like specimens from a South Seas expedition, bright and gaudy and mysterious. He lifted a blood-red fly and felt its weightlessness and the curve of its tiny hook. He brought it to the window and marveled at its redness and tickled his nose with its feathers.
    Out the window the forest was in sunshine and the surface of the pond sparked and glimmered where the furrowed ice gathered the snow-thaw. The barrel he’d righted lay overturned again and a fresh layer of garbage decorated the turf. A wetness in the air that could have been either the wetness of late fall or early spring gave the world an iridescence and a light in all its corners. But a cold current ran through the air still and quivered along the ground and above the water.
    As he sat on the stoop a short while later working a rag through the chambers of the shotgun a figure appeared on the far side of the pond. It was dressed in a dark coat and heavy woolen pants and might have been mistaken for the figure of a man but for the hair which hung down from a gray loden cap and hid her face entirely. She held to the tree line and stepped briefly out into the sun by a stand of young birches before disappearing into the pines.
    Voxlauer sat quietly for a moment. Then he picked up the rag and finished cleaning the shotgun, taking care to wipe the grit from around the hammer and pin. He took the hatchet from the woodpile and picked out three quartered stumps and split the stumps into narrower splints and hacked the splints in half across their length and carried the stack inside to the stove bench. A few scraps of bark lay around the stove’s grate and he gathered them up absently and heaped them into a little pile for kindling. Then he took up his hat and went outside.
    The tracks came down out of the slope above the pond and hatched back and forth as the ground steepened. The boots were heavy enough to leave clear prints in the needle