Free The Long Home by William Gay

soundless lope through unprotected light, the gun clasped across his chest, gaining invisibility momentarily in the accumulation of shadows against the wall.
    He lay in the grass. It had just been mown, he could smell it, could feel it, wet with dew, adhering to his bare arms. Slowly he began to rise, straightened to a crouch, scarcely daring to breathe. The screen was cool against his cheek.
    The room was yellow. He could see three-quarters of the bed and a man’s freckled arm, a yellow wall bare save for a door and a calendar with a scene of a lovable waif wending his way down a country road, fishing pole on his shoulder. Unloved and perhaps unlovable, Motormouth straightened further when the door opened and a young woman came through it. She was young and pretty, Motormouth’s wife. She wore a peachcolored slip and now she drew it over her head in one smooth motion, tossed her hair, breasts bobbing, turning toward the lightswitch. He stared at the darker thatch of her pubic hair as the room went down to darkness. He fumbled open his clothing, spent himself in an act of bitter solitude, affected more by the sight of her naked now than in all the nights she’d willingly shared his bed. He moved limberkneed back to the truck, more confident now that the lights were out.
    He brought out a packet from his hip pocket, unwrapped it. A soft avalanche of sugar down the throat of the gastank. “One lump or two?” he asked it. He moved on toward the barn, a figure curiously simian in the cold night. Somehow the sugar did not seem enough. He could smell the sour ammoniac odor of the horsestalls. He brought out his wirecutters and knelt in the grass. He could hear the soft shuffling of the horses. The woven wire clicked when he cut it, when he was through he went on to the barbed wire. The barbed wire was taut and it clanged when he cut it and sprang away into the darkness. The moon slipped behind a cloud and the horses were lost to his sight. He could hear them moving about the pen fretfully, almost furtively.
    He pocketed the cutters and took up his rifle and turned hurriedly back toward the woods. The cloud passed the moon then and its huge shadow paced him, dreamlike, through the surreal field of silver weeds.

4
    In Hovington’s last days they moved his bed out of the long front room and into a side room as if the sight of his dying might offend the sensibilities of such drunkards and whores as the nights seemed to draw ever more of. The long room held more cardtables now and the jukebox and sometimes late at night couples danced in the end where his bed had been. He’d lie in the darkness and listen to their laughter through the slatted walls, to the thump and slide of their feet on the rough floorboards. Perhaps in these last hours he was grateful for the jukebox. This world is not my home, the Crater family saying. Oh Lord, what will I do? Or perhaps he lay in the darkness and thought no thoughts at all, not even dwelling on the thousand deeds and nondeeds that had brought him to such a pass.
    The room had one fourpaned window and he used to lie curled facing it and peer across the weeds to the branch and past that to where the hills gave way to autumn sky.
    Visitors didn’t come much anymore and with the cessation of a need for appearances Pearl had stopped shaving him and his thin cheeks were covered with a soft black beard flecked with gray. He might have been a fanatic consumed from within by the fires of some fierce and obscure religion.
    The girl used to come sit by his bed in the ladderback chair and watch him without speaking. In those days she could study his face at leisure. His eyes would be closed, the eyes unmoving beneath the yellow lids, and she guessed he didn’t dream much anymore.
    She remembered his laughter from a childhood so long ago it might have been a tale she’d read in a dusty schoolbook. Then a little at a time silence had taken him over and there had been a time when she wanted to scream at