Kill the Dead(20)

He even ran some of the miles. The dawn was just a phantom smudge of light along the hills when he reached the town, the gate not even open. He did not wait for it, but climbed in at a place he knew of, illegal and urgent. Then, coming to the alley where the neat hovel sparkled between its far from immaculate supports, a sudden peculiar reluctance overcame him.

He loitered, undecided, on the street, until a woman came out of a door farther down, water bucket in hand. She glanced at him, and a half-startled look spread over her face. Something in the look unnerved him utterly, though why he did not know. He turned and ran.

He ran straight to the field that backed the dilapidated school. Again, he could not have said why, perhaps because it was a reference point, because he had come most often that way in the past.

In the field, he did not know what to do with himself. A dreadful uneasy restless exhaustion was coming over him. His hands buzzed and were full of nerves like needles. Insects seemed to crawl along his scalp, under the hair. Then, walking stupidly, he came on the apple tree and checked. It was still not quite true dawn, the sky silvery but nothing much lit up. For a moment the hideousness of the tree was more illusion than fact. As he was staring at it, he heard Silky’s voice call lightly across the twilight behind him.

He turned and there she was in her clean darned rags, her gossamer hair blowing.

“Hallo, Parl,” she said, “I thought you never would come back.”

He stared at her, as he had stared at the tree. When she started to come toward him, a monumental terror boiled up in him, as if his blood and all his bones had changed to blazing ice.

“I waited for you, Parl. I’ve waited, every time I could, here by the tree.”

He found he had backed a step away. When he did so, her face seemed to tremble. He still could not work out what was wrong. Then suddenly, as before, he broke into a run. He raced out of the field, away from her and from the tree, and as he ran, he shouted, long blank wordless shouts.

He did not stop again until a door stopped him. He had rushed right into it, and was crashing there with his fists. His yells had started all the dogs in the neighbourhood barking. Then the door opened and he almost fell through it. He recognised Silky’s grandmother as if from a long way off, and so he realised which door he had been hammering on.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, someone told you.”

She started to cry. He became aware that he was crying, too. She led him to a chair and she shut the door.

She did not tell him directly, for of course she supposed he knew. It was only by her elaborations of grief that he found out. On the night of the storm which wrecked the harvest, Silky had been lingering by the apple tree in the field behind the school. When lightning had struck the tree, it had struck Silky also. Silky was dead. She had been dead for more than a month.

The grandmother brewed a herbal tea, which once the three of them had drunk. Nobody could drink it now. She patently wanted to keep Parl with her. He had been so often with Silky that now he seemed to conjure the girl for the old woman. Then the grandmother went to a chest and brought out something mysteriously. Drawing near to him, she showed him a cloth packet and opened it to reveal a clot of shining threads.

“All I’ve got left of her,” she said.

She had trimmed Silky’s silken hair the very morning before she died. The lightning had left nothing much, stripping flesh and sweetness, as it had stripped the tree. But these fringes of hair the grandmother had, by sheer luck, retained. Now, with a supreme effort of sacrifice, she offered the packet to Parl.

The instant he saw the hair, he felt very sick. Truths that he would learn and reason for himself in later years, came to him now merely instinctively. He felt but did not know what the shorn hair represented, and what its power must be. He had not guessed yet what that power signified.

Even so, instinct ordered him. Though he almost cringed with revulsion, he took the packet of hair.

He sat, with the packet lying by him, most of the day, in Silky’s grandmother’s house. All that time they said hardly anything to each other. She did not think to ask him if he should be anywhere else. She had forgotten real life. And Parl, though he understood the world went on, the landowner and his fields and his anger, they were only dimly perceived, dimly remembered, events outside the bubble which enclosed him and the blasted apple tree and the dead girl and her shorn hair.

When the day began to drain away, he rose and politely said good-bye to the old woman.

As he was going to the field, he met three of his former fellow students from the school. They clustered around him, eager to commiserate, or, as it seemed to him then, to enjoy his pain. Finally, one said, “So-and-so told me the priests went to bless the ground where she was killed. So-and-so said she might not lie quiet.” One of the others cuffed him, growing aware of sheer bad taste at last. They went away.