Part 38 (1/2)

”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.

I tried to think of a good charm to say, and I've known some, but right then they didn't come to mind. I grabbed up a stick from the pile for whatever good might come of it. I heard Evadare, her voice strong now: ”Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night.”

The dark things churned, the eye-sparks blinked. I could swear that they gave back for the length of a step.

”Nor for the arrow that flieth by day,” Evadare said on. ”Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness.”

They shrank back on themselves again. They surrounded us, but they were back from where they'd been.

”What did you say to them?” I inquired Evadare, still with the stick ready.

”The Ninety-first Psalm,” she said back. ”It was all I could think of that might could possibly help.”

”It helped,” I said, and thought how I'd stood like a gone gump, not able to call up one good word to save us. ”If those were sins a-sneaking in ” I said, ”there was a sight of them, but good words made them wait.”

”How long will they wait?” she wondered me, little and huddled down by the fire. She was scared, gentlemen; and, no I reckon about it, so was I.

Those many sins, a-taking shape and hungry to grab onto somebody. One might not be too bad. You'd face up to one, maybe drive it back, maybe get it down and stomp it. But all of those together all sides of you, gummed into one misty ma.s.s. Being scared didn't help. You had to think of something to do.

Think what?

No way to run off from Trill Coster's sins, bunched all round us. Maybe the firelight slowed them some, slowed the terror by night, the pestilence in darkness. Evadare had taken them on her, and here they were. She kept whispering prayers. Meanwhile, they'd pulled back some. Now their eye-sparks showed thirty or forty feet away, all directions. I put wood on the fire. The flames stood up, not so much blue in the red now.

I took up my guitar and dared sit down. Old folks allow the devil is afraid of music. I picked and I sang:

The needle's eye that doth supply The thread that runs so true, And many a la.s.s have I let pa.s.s Because I thought of you.

And many a dark and stormy night I walked these mountains through; I'd stub my toe and down I'd go Because I thought of you.

Then again a loud, rattling laugh, and I got up. The laugh again. Into the firelight there walked that bare-shouldered woman called Nallie Willoughby, a-weaving herself while she walked, a-clappping her hands while she tossed her syrupy hair.

”I call that pretty singing, John,” she laughed to me. ”You aim to sleep here tonight? The ground makes a hard bed, that's a natural fact. Let me make you up a soft bed at my place.”

”I mustn't go from here right now,” said Evadare's soft voice. ”I've got me something to do hereabouts.”

Nollie quartered her eyes round to me. ”Then just you come, John. I done told vou it'll be a soft bed.”

”I thank you most to death,” I said, ”but no, ma'am, I stay here with Evadare.”

”You're just a d.a.m.ned fool,” she scorned me.