Part 25 (1/2)

”I'll take her sins on me, John,” said Evadare to me.

Silence then, so you might could hear a leaf drop. Jake started in to cry. ”Oh, ma'am,” he said, ”tell me your name so's I can bless it to all the angels.”

Somebody laughed a short laugh, but when I turned round, nair face had nair laugh on it.

”I'm called Evadare, and this is John with me.”

”Take it.” Jake pushed the money at her.

”I wouldn't do such a thing for money,” Evadare said. ”Only to give comfort by it, if I can.”

Jake blinked his wet eyes at her. The squatty man shut the coffin lid. ”All right, folks,” he said, and he and three others took hold and lifted. The whole bunch headed in past the church, to where I could see the stones of a burying ground. Round us the air turned dull, like as if a cloud had come up in the bright evening sky.

Jake hung back a moment. ”Better you don't come in,” he mumbled, and followed the others.

”I do hope I did right,” said Evadare, to herself and me both.

”You always do right,” I replied her.

We walked to where some trees bunched on the far side of the wagon road. I dropped our bundles under a sycamore. We could see the folks a-digging amongst the graves. I got sticks and made us a fire.

Evadare sat on a root. Chill had come into the air, along with that dimness. We talked, love talk but not purely cheerful talk. The sunset looked b.l.o.o.d.y-red in the west.

The folks finished the burying and headed off this way and that. I'd hope to speak to somebody, maybe see if Evadare could stay the night in a house. But they made wide turns not to come near us. I looked in my soogin sack to see if we had aught left to eat. But nair crumb.

”There's still some coffee in my bundle,” said Evadare. ”That'll taste good.” I took the pot to the stream and scooped up water. Somebody made a laughing noise and I looked up.

”I didn't get your name,” said the bare-shouldered woman, a-smiling her mouth at me.

”John,” I said. ”I heard you called Miss Nollie.”

”Nollie Willoughby.”

Her eyes combed me up and down in that last light of day. They were brown eyes, with hard, pale lights behind them.

”Long and tall, ain't you, John?” she said. ”You nair took Trill Coster's sins-only that little snip you're with did that. If you've got the sense you look to have, you'll leave her and them both, right now.”

”I've got the sense not to leave her,” I said.

”Come with me,” she bade me, a-smiling wider.

”No, ma'am, I thank you.”

I walked off from her. As I came near the trees, I heard Evadare say something, then a man's voice.

Quick I moved the coffeepot to my left hand and fisted up my right and hurried there to see what was what.

The fire burned with blue in its red. It showed me the Jake fellow, a-talking to Evadare where she sat on the root. He had a bucket of something in one hand and some tin dishes in the other.

”John,” he said as I came up, ”I reckoned I'd fetch youins some supper.”

”We do thank you,” I replied him, a-meaning it. ”Coffee will be ready directly. Sit down with us and have a cup,” and I set the pot on a stone amongst the fire and Evadare poured in the most part of our coffee.

Jake dropped down like somebody weary of this world. ”I won't stay long,” he said. ”I'd only fetch more sins on you.” He looked at Evadare. ”On her, who's got such a sight of them to pray out the way it is.”

Evadare took the bucket. It was hot squirrel stew and made two big bowls full. We were glad for it, I tell you, and for the coffee when it boiled. Jake's cup trembled in his hand. He told us about Trill Coster, the woman he still loved in her grave, and it wasn't what you'd call a nice tale to hear.

She'd been as beautiful as a she-lion, and she'd used her beauty like a she-lion, a-gobbling men. She could make men swear away their families and lives and hopes of heaven. For her they'd thieve or even kill, and go to jail for it. And not a d.a.m.n she'd given for what was good. She'd dared lightning to strike her; she'd danced round the church and called down a curse on it. Finally all folks turned from her-all but Jake, who loved her though she'd treated him like a dog. And when she'd died on a night of storm, they said bats flew round her bed.

Jake had stayed true to her who was so false. And that's how come him to want to get somebody to take her sins.

”For her sins run wild round this place, like foxes round a hen roost,” he said. ”I can hear them.”

I heard them too, not so much with my ears as with my bones.

”I promised I'd pray them away,” Evadare reminded him. ”You'd best go, Jake. Leave me to deal with them.”

He thanked her again and left. Full dark by then outside the ring of firelight, and we weren't alone there. I didn't see or hear plain at first, it was more like just a sense of what came. Lots of them. They felt to be a-moving close, the way wolves would shove round a campfire in the old days, to get up their nerve to rush in. A sort of low crouch of them in the dark, and here and there some sort of height half-guessed.

Like as if one or other of them stood high, or possibly climbed a tree branch. I stared and tried to reckon if there were shapes there, blacker than the night, and couldn't be sure one way or the other.

”I'm not about to be afraid,” said Evadare, and she knew she had to say that thing out loud for it to be true.

”Don't be,” I said. ”I've heard say that evil can't prevail against a pure heart. And your heart's pure. I wish mine was halfway as pure as yours.”

I pulled my guitar to me and touched the silver strings, to help us both. ”They say there are seven deadly sins,” said Evadare. ”I've heard them named, but I can't recollect them all.”

”I can,” I said. ”Pride. Covetousness. l.u.s.t. Envy. Greed. Anger. Gluttony. Who is there that mustn't fight to keep free from all of them?”

I began to pick and sing, words of my own making to the tune of ”Nine Yards of Other Cloth”:

And she's my love, my star above, And she's my heart's delight, And when she's here I need not fear The terror in the night.

”Who was that laughed?” Evadare cried out.

For there'd been a laugh, that died away when she spoke. I stopped my music and harked. A dfferent noise now. A stir, like something that tried not to make a sound but made one anyway, the ghost of a sound you had to strain to hear.

I set down my guitar and stood up. I said, loud and clear: ”Whoever or whatever's in sound of my voice, step up here close and look at the color of my eyes.”

The noise had died. I looked all the way round.

Deep night now, beyond where the fire shone. But I saw a sort of foggy-muddy cloud at a slink there. I thought maybe somebody had set a smudge fire and the wind blew the smoke to us. Only there was no wind. The air was as still as a shut-up room. I looked at the sky. There were little chunks of stars and about half a moon, with a twitch of dim cloud on it. But down where I was, silence and stillness.

”Look at those sparks,” said Evadare's whispery voice. First sight of them, they sure enough might could have been sparks-greeny ones. Then you made out they were two and two in that low dark mist, two and two and two, like eyes, like the green eyes of meat-eating things on the look for food. All the way round they were caught and set by pairs in the mist that bunched and clotted everywhere, close to the ground, a-beginning to flow in, crowd in.

And it wasn't just mist. There were shapes in it. One or two stood up to maybe a man's height, others made you think of dogs, only they weren't dogs. They huddled up, they were sort of stuck together-jellied together, you might say, the way a hobby of frog's eggs lie in a sticky bunch in the water. If it had been just at one place; but it was all the way round.