The Big Dark Sky (37)

Turning to the slice of sky that could be seen, she stared with intense longing colored more by apprehension than by hope. Although she was hungry, she could endure weeks without food if she must. Her thirst was more troubling than her hunger. Chapped lips. Scratchy throat. Already her skin felt dry. She could live a few days without water, but her strength would fade quickly as she dehydrated.

A cool flow of air slithered down through the gap between the church proper and the sacristy, bringing with it a fluttering, soft something that had been caught on the splintered edge of a roof beam. A small feather settled into her upraised hand, testimony that the birds hadn’t merely been figments of her imagination. If a black feather was a symbol that augured anything, however, it was surely predictive of death rather than life.

“Fuck that,” she said.

She hadn’t been spared in the accident that killed Octavia just to die in the service of a misanthropic lunatic’s vicious agenda.

Casting the feather to the floor, she said, “Think, damn it, think.”





29


Near the end of the flight from Denver to Montana, Joanna Chase opened her purse and withdrew a snapshot of her mother. It was one of many that she had found in the box of photographs the previous evening, when she had searched fruitlessly for a picture of Jimmy Two Eyes.

For whatever reason, Joanna didn’t care to maintain a gallery of family photos on a wall or on the shelves of a bookcase. As a consequence, she was surprised that her mental image of her mother had faded and that the photo revealed a woman of greater beauty and grace than memory could retain.

Another aspect of the snapshot unsettled Joanna a little. In those eyes and even in the curve of the smile, there seemed to be a subtle melancholy that she had never noticed as a child. If it was not just a quirk of this one picture, if it had been there in life, her mother had hidden it well.

She put the photo away as the plane touched down. Only as the passengers began disembarking did she realize how odd it was that she had brought her mother’s photo but not one of her father.





30


Carrying backpacks and walking sticks, they hiked north along the river, through a primeval forest that made Colson Fielding think of a cathedral that he’d once seen when his family had visited New York City. The tall trees were like columns, and the boughs overhead were reminiscent of a series of arched vaults. The pine-scented air smelled a little like incense, and a churchy hush lay over it all.

Colson, thirteen years old, had never seen a ghost town, so he was looking forward to exploring Zipporah with his father. Although it would be cool if the place was haunted, he didn’t expect ghosts, only a satisfying measure of creepiness and a lot of history.

His father, Steve, was a professor at the state university in Billings. Dad knew enough about Montana and American history to bore your ass off ten times over. Well, that was unfair. A lot of history was just boring, and no one could pump it up until it leaped off the screen like a movie from Marvel Studios, although his father made maybe half of it pretty darn interesting. He taught elective rather than required courses, and his classes were always oversubscribed.

Dad would have liked nothing more than for his son to catch the history bug and be infected with a love of the past, as he put it, “in all its blazing glory and sad darknesses.” But too much of history seemed to be about politics, which was all bullshit when it wasn’t also flat-out insanity. Colson wanted to focus on the future and a life in the sky as a jet pilot, maybe as an astronaut in the United States Space Force. The human destiny was to move ever onward and outward: He’d heard that in a sci-fi movie, and it had struck him as true and right.

As the forest closed ever tighter around them, and as they struggled over challenging terrain, Colson thought it was amazing that he had learned to enjoy these outings. He once would have found hiking with his father as tedious as the details of the war of the “copper kings” who battled over ore deposits around Butte, Montana, which eventually produced eleven billion pounds of copper, or even as tiresome as the story of the bloody wars between the Crow and the Sioux, as if any of that had anything to do with today.

Then the previous summer, when Colson was twelve, he’d felt guilty for resisting his father’s desire that they slog through the wilds together, enduring the miseries of nature. He hadn’t known why he felt guilty. Maybe because Mom felt guilty that she also did not share her husband’s interest in hiking and camping and fighting off bears in the green hell of the woods, though he always went to chick flicks and symphonies with her. Like mother, like son: Colson preferred a four-star motel to a tent and sleeping bag, and any restaurant food to campfire victuals spooned from a heated tin can.

He’d finally broken down and agreed to go on a three-day hike, though with the conviction that he would be killed either by snakes or mountain lions, if not by snakes and mountain lions working in demonic collaboration. To his surprise, after the first day, he had begun to enjoy the experience. For one thing, the fields and forests of Montana proved not to be as dangerous as the python-festooned jungles of South America. For another thing, his dad knew as much about nature as he knew about history, at home in the wilds no less than at their house in Billings. For a third thing, his dad was good company, especially when he wasn’t going on about Custer’s Last Stand or Yellowstone Kelly or Chief Black Otter.

That summer, they went on four hikes together, and another two in the winter. During the current summer, they’d been on two treks prior to this expedition to Zipporah. Gradually, Colson had grown hardier, more muscular, more limber, and more self-confident. He respected rattlesnakes and mountain lions and wolves and bears, and he remained wary of them, but he no longer feared them irrationally.