The Wind Through the Keyhole

  He might have missed Peter Cosington and Ernie Marchly anyway, if Baldy Anderson, one of Tree's big farmers, hadn't stopped by the pair's storing shed to chat as they hitched their mules and prepared for the day. The three men listened to his story in grim silence, and when Tim finally stumbled to a halt, telling them his mother was still blind this morning, Square Peter gripped Tim by the upper arms and said, "Count on us, boy. We'll rouse every ax-man in town, those who work the blossies as well as those who go up the Ironwood. There'll be no cutting in the forest today."

  Anderson said, "And I'll send my boys around to the farmers. To Destry and to the sawmill, as well."

  "What about the constable?" Slow Ernie asked, a trifle nervously.

  Anderson dipped his head, spat between his boots, and wiped his chin with the heel of his hand. "Gone up Tavares way, I hear, either looking for poachers or visiting the woman he keeps up there. Makes no difference. Howard Tasley en't never been worth a fart in a high wind. We'll do the job ourselves, and have Kells jugged by the time he comes back."

  "With a pair of broken arms, if he kicks up rough," Cosington added. "He's never been able to hold his drink or his temper. He was all right when he had Jack Ross to rein 'im in, but look what it's come to! Nell Ross beaten blind! Big Kells always kept a warm eye for her, and the only one who didn't know it was--"

  Anderson hushed him with an elbow, then turned to Tim, bending forward with his hands on his knees, for he was tallish. "'Twas the Covenant Man who found your da's corse?"

  "Aye."

  "And you saw the body yourself."

  Tim's eyes filled, but his voice was steady enough. "Aye, so I did."

  "On our stake," Slow Ernie said. "T'back of one of our stubs. The one where the pooky's set up housekeeping."

  "Aye."

  "I could kill him just for that," Cosington said, "but we'll bring him alive if we can. Ernie, you n me'd best ride up there and bring back the . . . you know, remains . . . before we get in on the search. Baldy, can you get the word around on your own?"

  "Aye. We'll gather at the mercantile. Keep a good eye out along the Ironwood Trail as you go, boys, but my best guess is that we'll find the booger in town, laid up drunk." And, more to himself than to the others: "I never believed that dragon story."

  "Start behind Gitty's," Slow Ernie said. "He's slept it off there more than once."

  "So we will." Baldy Anderson looked up at the sky. "I don't care much for this weather, tell ya true. It's too warm for Wide Earth. I hope it don't bring a storm, and I hope to gods it don't bring a starkblast. That'd cap everything. Wouldn't be none of us able to pay the Covenant Man when he comes next year. Although if it's true what the boy says, he's turned a bad apple out of the basket and done us a service."

  He didn't do my mama one, Tim thought. If he hadn't given me that key, and if I hadn't used it, she'd still have her sight.

  "Go on home now," Marchly said to Tim. He spoke kindly, but in a tone that brooked no argument. "Stop by my house on the way, do ya, and tell my wife there's ladies wanted at yours. Widow Smack must need to go home and rest, for she's neither young nor well. Also . . ." He sighed. "Tell her they'll be wanted at Stokes's burying parlor later on."

  This time Tim had taken Misty, and she was the one who had to stop and nibble at every bush. By the time he got home, two wagons and a pony-trap had passed him, each carrying a pair of women eager to help his mother in her time of hurt and trouble.

  He had no more than stabled Misty next to Bitsy before Ada Cosington was on the porch, telling him he was needed to drive the Widow Smack home. "You can use my pony-trap. Go gentle where there's ruts, for the poor woman's fair done up."

  "Has she got her shakes, sai?"

  "Nay, I think the poor thing's too tired to shake. She was here when she was most needed, and may have saved your mama's life. Never forget that."

  "Can my mother see again? Even a little?"

  Tim knew the answer from sai Cosington's face before she opened her mouth. "Not yet, son. You must pray."

  Tim thought of telling her what his father had sometimes said: Pray for rain all you like, but dig a well as you do it. In the end, he kept silent.

  It was a slow trip to the Widow's house with her little burro tied to the back of Ada Cosington's pony-trap. The unseasonable heat continued, and the sweet-sour breezes that usually blew from the Endless Forest had fallen still. The Widow tried to say cheerful things about Nell, but soon gave up; Tim supposed they sounded as false to her ears as they did to his own. Halfway up the high street, he heard a thick gurgling sound from his right. He looked around, startled, then relaxed. The Widow had fallen asleep with her chin resting on her birdlike chest. The hem of her veil lay in her lap.

  When they reached her house on the outskirts of the village, he offered to see her inside. "Nay, only help me up the steps and after that I'll be fine-o. I want tea with honey and then my bed, for I'm that tired. You need to be with your mother now, Tim. I know half the ladies in town will be there by the time you get back, but it's you she needs."

  For the first time in the five years he'd had her as a schoolteacher, she gave Tim a hug. It was dry and fierce. He could feel her body thrumming beneath her dress. She wasn't too tired to shake after all, it seemed. Nor too tired to give comfort to a boy--a tired, angry, deeply confused boy--who badly needed it.

  "Go to her. And stay away from that dark man, should he appear to thee. He's made of lies from boots to crown, and his gospels bring nothing but tears."

  On his way back down the high street, he encountered Straw Willem and his brother, Hunter (known as Spot Hunter for his freckles), riding to meet the posse, which had gone out Tree Road. "They mean to search every stake and stub on the Ironwood," Spot Hunter said excitedly. "We'll find him."

  The posse hadn't found Kells in town after all, it seemed. Tim had a feeling they'd not find him along the Iron, either. There was no basis for the feeling, but it was strong. So was his feeling that the Covenant Man hadn't finished with him yet. The man in the black cloak had had some of his fun . . . but not all of it.

  His mother was sleeping, but woke when Ada Cosington ushered him in. The other ladies sat about in the main room, but they had not been idle while Tim was away. The pantry had been mysteriously stocked--every shelf groaned with bottles and sacks--and although Nell was a fine country housekeeper, Tim had never seen the place looking so snick. Even the overhead beams had been scrubbed clean of woodsmoke.

  Every trace of Bern Kells had been removed. The awful trunk had been banished to beneath the back porch stoop, to keep company with the spiders, fieldmice, and moortoads.

  "Tim?" And when he put his hands in Nell's, which were reaching out, she sighed with relief. "All right?"

  "Aye, Mama, passing fine." This was a lie, and they both knew it.

  "We knew he was dead, didn't we? But it's no comfort. It's as if he's been killed all over again." Tears began to spill from her sightless eyes. Tim cried, himself, but managed to do it silently. Hearing him sob would do her no good. "They'll bring him to the little burying parlor Stokes keeps out behind his smithy. Most of these kind ladies will go to him there, to do the fitting things, but will you go to him first, Timmy? Will you take him your love and all of mine? For I can't. The man I was fool enough to marry has lamed me so badly I can hardly walk . . . and of course I can't see anything. What a ka-mai I turned out to be, and what a price we've paid!"

  "Hush. I love you, Mama. Of course I'll go."

  But because there was time, he went first to the barn (there were far too many women in the cottage for his taste) and made a jackleg bed with hay and an old mule blanket. He fell asleep almost at once. He was awakened around three of the clock by Square Peter, who held his hat clasped to his breast and wore an expression of sad solemnity.

  Tim sat up, rubbing his eyes. "Have you found Kells?"

  "Nay, lad, but we've found your father, and brought him back to town. Your mother says you'll pay respects for the
both of you. Does she say true?"

  "Aye, yes." Tim stood up, brushing hay from his pants and shirt. He felt ashamed to have been caught sleeping, but his rest the previous night had been thin, and haunted by bad dreams.

  "Come, then. We'll take my wagon."

  The burying parlor behind the smithy was the closest thing the town had to a mortuary in a time when most country folk preferred to see to their own dead, interring them on their own land with a wooden cross or a slab of roughly carved stone to mark the grave. Dustin Stokes--inevitably known as Hot Stokes--stood outside the door, wearing white cotton pants instead of his usual leathers. Over them billowed a vast white shirt, falling all the way to the knees so it looked almost like a dress.

  Looking at him, Tim remembered it was customary to wear white for the dead. He understood everything in that moment, realizing the truth in a way that not even looking at his father's open-eyed corse in running water had been able to make him realize it, and his knees loosened.

  Square Peter bore him up with a strong hand. "Can'ee do it, lad? If'ee can't, there's no shame. He was your da', and I know you loved him well. We all did."

  "I'll be all right," Tim said. He couldn't seem to get enough air into his lungs, and the words came out in a whisper.

  Hot Stokes put a fist to his forehead and bowed. It was the first time in his life that Tim had been saluted as a man. "Hile, Tim, son of Jack. His ka's gone into the clearing, but what's left is here. Will'ee come and see?"

  "Yes, please."

  Square Peter stayed behind, and now it was Stokes who took Tim's arm, Stokes not dressed in his leather breeches and cursing as he fanned an open furnace-hole with his bellows, but clad in ceremonial white; Stokes who led him into the little room with forest scenes painted on the walls all around; Stokes who took him to the ironwood bier in the center--that open space that had ever represented the clearing at the end of the path.

  Big Jack Ross also wore white, although his was a fine linen shroud. His lidless eyes stared raptly at the ceiling. Against one painted wall leaned his coffin, and the room was filled with the sour yet somehow pleasant smell of it, for the coffin was also of ironwood, and would keep this poor remnant very well for a thousand years and more.

  Stokes let go of his arm, and Tim went forward on his own. He knelt. He slipped one hand into the linen shroud's overlap and found his da's hand. It was cold, but Tim did not hesitate to entwine his warm and living fingers with the dead ones. This was the way the two of them had held hands when Tim was only a sma' one, and barely able to toddle. In those days, the man walking beside him had seemed twelve feet tall, and immortal.

  Tim knelt by the bier and beheld the face of his father.

  When he came out, Tim was startled by the declining angle of the sun, which told him more than an hour had passed. Cosington and Stokes stood near the man-high ash heap at the rear of the smithy, smoking roll-ups. There was no news of Big Kells.

  "P'raps he's thow'd hisself in the river and drownded," Stokes speculated.

  "Hop up in the wagon, son," Cosington said. "I'll drive'ee back to yer ma's."

  But Tim shook his head. "Thankee, I'll walk, if it's all the same to you."

  "Need time to think, is it? Well, that's fine. I'll go on to my own place. It'll be a cold dinner, but I'll eat it gladly. No one begrudges your ma at a time like this, Tim. Never in life."

  Tim smiled wanly.

  Cosington put his feet on the splashboard of his wagon, seized the reins, then had a thought and bent down to Tim. "Have an eye out for Kells as ye walk, is all. Not that I think ye'll see 'im, not in daylight. And there'll be two or three strong fellas posted around yer homeplace tonight."

  "Thankee-sai."

  "Nar, none of that. Call me Peter, lad. You're old enough, and I'd have it." He reached down and gave Tim's hand a brief squeeze. "So sorry about yer da'. Dreadful sorry."

  Tim set out along Tree Road with the sun declining red on his right side. He felt hollow, scooped out, and perhaps it was better so, at least for the time being. With his mother blind and no man in the house to bring a living, what future was there for them? Big Ross's fellow woodcutters would help as much as they could, and for as long as they could, but they had their own burdens. His da' had always called the homeplace a freehold, but Tim now saw that no cottage, farm, or bit of land in Tree Village was truly free. Not when the Covenant Man would come again next year, and all the years after that, with his scroll of names. Suddenly Tim hated far-off Gilead, which for him had always seemed (when he thought of it at all, which was seldom) a place of wonders and dreams. If there were no Gilead, there would be no taxes. Then they would be truly free.

  He saw a cloud of dust rising in the south. The lowering sun turned it into a bloody mist. He knew it was the women who had been at the cottage. They were bound in their wagons and traps for the burying parlor Tim had just left. There they would wash the body that had already been washed by the stream into which it had been cast. They would anoint it with oils. They would put birch bark inscribed with the names of his wife and son in the dead man's right hand. They would put the blue spot on his forehead and place him in his coffin. This Hot Stokes would nail shut with short blows of his hammer, each blow terrible in its finality.

  The women would offer Tim their condolences with the best will in the world, but Tim didn't want them. Didn't know if he could bear them without breaking down once again. He was so tired of crying. With that in mind, he left the road and walked overland to the little chuckling rivulet known as Stape Brook, which would in short order bring him to its source-point: the clear spring between the Ross cottage and barn.

  He trudged in a half-dream, thinking first of the Covenant Man, then of the key that would work only once, then of the pooky, then of his mother's hands reaching toward the sound of his voice . . .

  Tim was so preoccupied that he almost passed the object jutting up from the path that followed the course of the stream. It was a steel rod with a white tip that looked like ivory. He hunkered, staring at it with wide eyes. He remembered asking the Covenant Man if it was a magic wand, and heard the enigmatic reply: It started life as the gearshift of a Dodge Dart.

  It had been jammed to half its length in the hardpan, something that must have taken great strength. Tim reached for it, hesitated, then told himself not to be a fool, it was no pooky that would paralyze him with its bite and then eat him alive. He pulled it free and examined it closely. Steel it was, fine-forged steel of the sort only the Old Ones had known how to make. Very valuable, for sure, but was it really magic? To him it felt like any other metal thing, which was to say cold and dead.

  In the proper hand, the Covenant Man whispered, any object can be magic.

  Tim spied a frog hopping along a rotted birch on the far side of the stream. He pointed the ivory tip at it and said the only magic word he knew: abba-ka-dabba. He half-expected the frog to fall over dead or change into . . . well, something. It didn't die and it didn't change. What it did was hop off the log and disappear into the high green grass at the edge of the brook. Yet this had been left for him, he was sure of it. The Covenant Man had somehow known he'd come this way. And when.

  Tim turned south again, and saw a flash of red light. It came from between their cottage and the barn. For a moment Tim only stood looking at that bright scarlet reflection. Then he broke into a run. The Covenant Man had left him the key; the Covenant Man had left him his wand; and beside the spring where they drew their water, he had left his silver basin.

  The one he used in order to see.

  Only it wasn't the basin, just a battered tin pail. Tim's shoulders slumped and he started for the barn, thinking he would give the mules a good feed before he went in. Then he stopped and turned around.

  A pail, but not their pail. Theirs was smaller, made of ironwood, and equipped with a blossie handle. Tim returned to the spring and picked it up. He tapped the ivory knob of the Covenant Man's wand against the side. The pail gave back a deep and ringing
note that made Tim leap back a step. No piece of tin had ever produced such a resonant sound. Now that he thought of it, no old tin pail could reflect the declining sun as perfectly as this one had, either.

  Did you think I'd give up my silver basin to a half-grown sprat like you, Tim, son of Jack? Why would I, when any object can be magic? And, speaking of magic, haven't I given you my very own wand?

  Tim understood that this was but his imagination making the Covenant Man's voice, but he believed the man in the black cloak would have said much the same, if he had been there.

  Then another voice spoke in his head. He's made of lies from boots to crown, and his gospels bring nothing but tears.

  This voice he pushed away and stooped to fill the pail that had been left for him. When it was full, doubt set in again. He tried to remember if the Covenant Man had made any particular series of passes over the water--weren't mystic passes part of magic?--and couldn't. All Tim could remember was the man in black telling him that if he disturbed the water, he would see nothing.

  Doubtful not so much of the magic wand as of his ability to use it, Tim waved the rod aimlessly back and forth above the water. For a moment there was nothing. He was about to give up when a mist clouded the surface, blotting out his reflection. It cleared, and he saw the Covenant Man looking up at him. It was dark wherever the Covenant Man was, but a strange green light, no bigger than a thumbnail, hovered over his head. It rose higher, and by its light Tim saw a board nailed to the trunk of an ironwood tree. ROSS-KELLS had been painted on it.

  The bit of green light spiraled up until it was just below the surface of the water in the pail, and Tim gasped. There was a person embedded in that green light--a tiny green woman with transparent wings on her back.

  It's a sighe--one of the fairy-folk!

  Seemingly satisfied that she had his attention, the sighe spun away, lighted briefly on the Covenant Man's shoulder, then seemed to leap from it. Now she hovered between two posts holding up a crossbar. From this there hung another sign, and, as was the case with the lettering on the sign marking out the Ross-Kells stake, Tim recognized his father's careful printing. IRONWOOD TRAIL ENDS HERE, the sign read. BEYOND LIES FAGONARD. And below this, in larger, darker letters: TRAVELER, BEWARE!