Fidelity Read online

  Needing the light now that they were in the cavern of the barn, Danny carried Burley the length of the driveway, stepping around a derelict wagon and then into a stripping room attached at one corner. This was a small shed that was tighter and better preserved than the barn. A bench ran the length of the north side under a row of windows. Danny propped Burley against the wall at the near end of the bench, which he then swept clean with an old burlap sack. He made a pallet of the bedclothes and laid Burley on it and covered him.

  “Now,” he said, “I’ve got to go back to the truck for some things. You’re in the old barn on Stepstone, and you’re all right. I won’t be gone but a few minutes.”

  He shone the light a moment on the still face. In its profound sleep, it wore a solemnity that Burley, in his waking life, would never have allowed. And yet it was, as it had not been in the hospital, unmistakably the face of the man who for eighty-two years had been Burley Coulter. Here, where it belonged, the face thus identified itself and assumed a power that kept Danny standing there, shining the light on it, and that made him say to himself with care, “Now these are the last things. Now what happens will not happen again in his life.”

  He hurried back along the road to the truck and removed an axe, a spade, and a heavy steel spud bar from among the fencing tools in the back. The rain continued, falling steadily as it had fallen since it began. He shouldered the bar and spade and, carrying the axe in his left hand, returned to the barn.

  Burley had not moved. He breathed on, as steadily and forcelessly as the falling rain.

  “You’re in a good place,” Danny said. “You’ve slept here before and you’re all right. Now I’ve got to sleep a little myself. I’ll be close by.”

  He was tired at last. There were several sheets of old roofing stacked in the barn, and he took two of these, laying one on the floor just inside the open door nearest to the shed where Burley slept and propping the other as a shield from the draft that was pulling up the driveway. He lay down on his back and folded his arms on his chest. His clothes were damp, but with his hunting coat snug around him he was warm enough.

  Though in his coming and going he had hardly made a sound, once he lay still the woods around the barn reassembled a quiet that was larger and older than his own. It was as though the woods had stopped whatever it was doing to regard him as he entered, had permitted itself to be distracted by him and his burden and his task, and now that he had ceased to move it went back to its unfinished preoccupations. The rain went on with its steady patter on the barn roof and on the leafy woods.

  Danny lay still and thought of all that had happened since nightfall and of what he might yet have ahead of him. For a while he continued to feel in all his nerves the swaying of the old truck as it sped along the curves of the highway. And then he ceased to think either of the past or of what was to come. The rain continued to fall. The flowing branch made a varying little song in his mind. His mind went slowly to and fro with a dark treetop in the wind. And then he slept.

  Lyda had the telephone put in when they closed the school in Port William and began to haul even the littlest children all the way to the consolidated grade school at Hargrave. This required a bus ride of an hour and a half each way for the Branch children and took them much farther out of reach than they had ever been.

  “They’ll be gone from before daylight to after dark in the winter, who with we don’t know, doing what we don’t know,” Lyda said, “and they’ve got to be able to call home if they need to.”

  “All right,” Danny said. “And there won’t anybody call us up on it but the kids—is that right?”

  When it rang at night, it just scared Lyda to death, even when the kids were home. If Danny was gone, she always started worrying about him when she heard the phone ring.

  She hurried down to the kitchen in her nightgown. She made a swipe at the light switch beside the kitchen door, but missed and went ahead anyhow. There was no trouble in finding the telephone in the dark; it went right on ringing as if she weren’t rushing to answer it.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Hello. May I speak to Mr. Daniel Branch, please?” It was a woman’s voice, precise and correct.

  “Danny’s not here. I’m his wife. Can I help you?”

  “Can you tell us how to get in touch with Mr. Branch?”

  “No. He said something about Indiana, but I don’t know where.”

  There was a pause, as though the voice at the other end were preparing itself.

  “Mrs. Branch, this is the hospital. I’m afraid I have some very disturbing news. Mr. Coulter—Mr. Burley Coulter—has disappeared.”

  “Oh!” Lyda said. She was grinning into the dark, and there had been a tremor of relief in her voice that she trusted might have passed for dismay.

  “Oh, my goodness!” she said finally.

  “Let me assure you, Mrs. Branch, that the entire hospital staff is deeply concerned about this. We have, of course, notified the police—”

  “Oh!” Lyda said.

  “—and all other necessary steps will be taken. Please have your husband contact us as soon as he returns.”

  “I will,” Lyda said.

  After she hung up, Lyda stood thinking in the dark a moment. And then she turned on the light and called Henry Catlett, whose phone rang a long time before he answered. She was not sure yet that she needed a lawyer, but she could call Henry as a friend.

  “Henry, it’s Lyda. I’m sorry to get you up in the middle of the night.”

  “It’s all right, “ Henry said.

  “The hospital just called. Uncle Burley has disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “That’s what the lady said.”

  There was a pause.

  “Where’s Danny?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “I see.”

  There was another pause.

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “He said something about Indiana, Henry. That’s all he said.”

  “He said that, and that’s all?”

  “About.”

  “Did you tell that to the lady from the hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she want to know anything else?”

  “No.”

  “And you didn’t tell her anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Did she say anything else?”

  “She said the police had been notified.”

  There was another pause.

  “What time is it, Lyda?”

  “Three o’clock. A little after.”

  “And you and the kids will have the morning chores to do, and you’ll have to get the kids fed and off to school.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So you’ll have to be there for a while. Maybe that’s all right. But you’ll have to expect a call or maybe a visit from the police, Lyda. When you talk to them, tell them exactly what you told the lady at the hospital. Tell the truth, but don’t tell any more than you’ve already told. If they want to know more, tell them I’m your lawyer and they must talk to me.”

  “I will.”

  “Are you worried about Burley and Danny?”

  “No.”

  “Are you worried about talking to the police?”

  “I’m uneasy, but I’m not worried.”

  “All right. Let’s try to sleep some more. Tomorrow might be a busy day.”

  Danny woke cold and hungry. He was lying on his back with his arms folded on his chest; he had slept perhaps two hours, and he had not moved. Nor had anything moved in the barn or in the wooded hollow around it, so far as he could tell, except the little stream of Stepstone, which continued to make the same steady song it had been making when he fell asleep. A few crickets sang. The air was still, and in openings of mist that had gathered in the hollow he could see the stars.

  Though he was cold, for several minutes he did not move. He loved the s
tillness and was reluctant to break it. An owl trilled nearby and another answered some distance away. Danny turned onto his side to face the opening of the doorway, pillowed his head on his left forearm, and, taking off his cap, ran the fingers of his right hand slowly through his hair.

  He yawned, stretched, and got up. Taking the flashlight, he went in to where Burley lay and shone the light on him. Nothing had changed. The old body breathed on with the same steady yet forceless and shallow breaths. Danny saw at once all he needed to see, and yet he remained for a few moments, shining the light. And he said again in his mind, “These are the last things now. Everything that happens now happens for the last time in his life.” He reached out with his hand and took hold of Burley’s shoulder and shook it gently, as if to waken him, but he did not wake.

  “It’ll soon be morning,” he said aloud. “I’m hungry now. I need to make a fire and fix a little breakfast before the light comes. We can’t send up any smoke after daylight. I’ll be close by.”

  He gathered dry scraps of wood from the barn floor, and then he pried loose a locust tierpole with the bark still on it and rapidly cut it into lengths with the axe. Just outside the doorway, he made a small fire between two rocks on which he set his skillet. By the light of the flashlight he sliced a dozen thick slices from the jowl and started several of them frying. He crossed the creek to where a walled spring flowed out of the hillside. He found the rusted coffee can that he kept there, dipped it full and drank, and then dipped it full again. Carrying the filled can, he went back to his fire, where he knelt on one knee and attended to the skillet. The birds had begun to sing, and the sky was turning pale above the eastward trees.

  When all the meat was fried, he set the skillet off the fire. With water from the spring and grease from the fried meat, he moistened some cornmeal and made six hoecakes, each the size of the skillet. When he was finished with his cooking, he took the pair of surgical gloves from his pocket and stirred them in the fire until they were burned. He brought water from the creek then and put out the fire. He divided the food carefully and ate half of it. He ate slowly and with pleasure, watching the light come. Movement, fire, and now the food in his belly had taken the chill out of his flesh, but fall was in the air that morning, and he welcomed it. The day would be clear and fine. And more would come—brisk, bright, dark-shadowed days colored by the turning leaves, days that would call up the hunter feeling in him. Suddenly he remembered Elton Penn walking into the woods under the stars of a bright frosty night, half singing, as his way was, “Clear as a bell, cold as hell, and smells like old cheese.” Now Elton was three years dead.

  As Danny watched, the light reddened and warmed in the sky. The last of the stars disappeared. Above him, on both sides of the hollow, the wet leaves of the treetops began to shine among the fading strands and shelves of mist. Eastward, the mist took a stain of pink from the rising sun and glowed. And Danny felt a happiness that he knew was not his at all, that did not exist because he felt it but because it was here and he had returned to it.

  He carried his skillet to the creek, scoured it out with handfuls of a fine gravel that he found there and left it on a rock to dry.

  He picked his way through the young thicket growth closing around the barn and entered the stand of old trees that covered the south slope. There the great trees stood around him, the thready night mists caught in their branches, and every leaf was still. When the first white man in this place—the first Coulter or Catlett or Feltner or whoever it was—had passed through this crease of the hill, these trees were here, and the stillness in which they stood and grew had been here forever.

  Timber cutters, in recent years, had had their eye on these trees and had approached Burley about “harvesting” them. “I reckon you had better talk to Danny here,” Burley said. And Danny smiled that completely friendly, totally impenetrable smile of his, and merely shook his head.

  Now Danny was looking for a place well in among the big trees and yet not too far from the creek or too readily accessible to the eye. His study took him a while, but finally he saw what he was looking for. Under a tall, straight chinquapin that was sound and not too old, a tree that would be standing a long time, there was a shallow trough in the ground, left perhaps by the uprooting of another tree a long time ago; the place was open and clear of undergrowth but could not be seen except against a patch of thicket around a windfall. Danny stood and thought again to test his satisfaction, and was satisfied.

  As he turned away he noticed, strung between two saplings, the dew-beaded orb of a large orange spider. He stopped to look at it and soon found the spider’s home, a sort of tube fashioned of two leaves and so not easy to see, where the spider could withdraw to sleep or take shelter from the rain. It would not be long, Danny thought, before the spiders would have to go out of business for the winter. Soon there would be hard frosts, and the webs would be cumbered and torn by the falling leaves.

  Sunlight now filled the sky above the shadowy woods. He went back to the barn, preoccupied with his thoughts, and so he was startled, on entering the stripping room, by Burley’s opened eyes, looking at him.

  He stopped, for the force of his surprise was almost that of fright. And then he went over to the bench and laid his hand on Burley’s. Burley’s eyes were perfectly calm; he was smiling. Slowly, pausing to breathe between phrases, he said, “I allowed you’d get here about the same time I did.”

  “Well, you were right,” Danny said. “We made it. Do you know where you are?”

  Again, smiling, Burley spoke, his voice so halting and weak as to seem not uttered by bodily strength at all but by some pure presence of recollection and will: “Right here.”

  He was quoting himself as the hero of an old joke and an old story in which, lost on a night hunt, his companions had asked him where they were, and he had told them, “Right here.”

  “You’re right again,” Danny said, knowing that Burley did know where he was. “Are you comfortable? Is there anything you want?”

  This time Burley only said, “Drink.” He turned his head a little and looked at the treetops beyond the window.

  Danny said, “I’ll go to the spring.”

  At the spring, he drank and then dipped up a drink for Burley. When he returned, Burley’s eyes were closed again, and he looked more deeply sunk within himself than before. It was as though his soul, like a circling hawk, had swung back into this world on a wide curve, to look once more out of his eyes at what he had always known and to speak with his voice, and then had swung out of it again, the curve widening. Danny stood still, holding the can of water. He could hear Burley’s breaths coming slower than before, tentative and unsteady. Danny listened. He picked up Burley’s wrist and held it. And then he shouldered his tools and went up into the woods and began to dig.

  Henry Catlett tried hard to take his own advice, but one thought ran on to another and he could not sleep. There was too much he needed to know that he did not know. Within twenty minutes he saw that he was not going to sleep again. He got up in the dark and, taking care not to disturb Sarah who had gone back to sleep after the phone rang, went downstairs, turned on a light and called the hospital. After some trial and error, he was transferred to the supervisor who had talked to Lyda.

  “This is Henry Catlett. I have a little law practice up the river here at Hargrave. I hear you’ve mislaid one of your patients.”

  The voice in the receiver became extremely businesslike: “The patient would be—?”

  “Coulter. Burley Coulter.”

  “Yes. Well, as you no doubt have heard, Mr. Catlett, Mr. Coulter was reported missing from his room at a little before two o’clock this morning. Such a thing has never happened here before, Mr. Catlett. Let me assure you, sir, that we’re doing everything possible on behalf of the victim and his family.”

  “Of course,” Henry said. “I can imagine. Well, I’m calling on behalf of the family. Have you any clues as to what happened?”

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bsp; “Um. For that, I think I had better have you talk with the investigating officer who was here from the police. Let me find his number. Please hold one minute.”

  “Take two,” Henry said.

  She gave him a name and a number, which Henry proceeded to dial.

  “Officer Bush,” he said, “I’m Henry Catlett, a country lawyer of sorts up at Hargrave. I’m calling on behalf of the family of Mr. Burley Coulter, who seems to have disappeared from his hospital room.”

  “Yes, Mr. Catlett.”

  “I understand that you were the investigating officer. What did you find out?”

  “Not much, I’m afraid, sir. Mr. Coulter was definitely kidnapped. His attacker disconnected him from the life-support system and wheeled him out, we assume, by way of the emergency entrance. We have one witness, a nurse, who may have seen the kidnapper. She described him as a huge man in a blue shirt; she didn’t get a good look at his face. She saw him on an elevator, going up with an empty gurney and down with what she took to be a corpse. Aside from that, we have only the coincidental disappearance of the victim’s next of kin, Danny Branch, who his wife says may have gone to Indiana.”

  “Anything solid? Any fingerprints?”

  “Nothing, Mr. Catlett. The man smeared everything he touched, and he didn’t touch more than he had to. He may have used a pair of surgical gloves from the room.”