The Winter Rider by Berry Fleming

Author:Berry Fleming
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781453290668
Publisher: The Permanent Press

FIVE

From the middle of the river I glanced back. Hervin was standing with Sarah in the yard, among the trees, not on the bank; I didn’t see the old man. The putty-white mule seemed hardly to have moved an ear while we had been there. Then the branches and moss and trunks worked in between us and it was all behind me. We were on the center seat, complete with manuscript and all fiddles, and I said with a sigh up from all my depths, “Well, we made it!” which seemed fair to say; allowing an hour we should be there about three. I showed her the ten-after-two on my watch but she didn’t look, gazing down the water with no expression at all and undoing a middle button of the great khaki coat and letting me see the barrel of the old man’s gun; the stock protruded an inch or two at the bottom but I didn’t think it would be visible to Luke in the stern, what with the folds of the coat behind her heels and the almost solid thwart the seat rested on. She mumbled, biting her lip, “If the doctor can pack a gun I don’t see why we can’t.”

The first thought I could get into words was that the damned thing was loaded and she eased her hand into a big side pocket and without looking down slipped out the two shells for a second and put them back. I said, “All right,” but I didn’t much like it; these kids see too many movies.

She said, “I just borrowed it. The way you borrowed the hat.”

She told me I had better put it on and I gathered myself together and did, denting the crown to make it mine. It fitted. That is, it was the right size; it didn’t feel right. She smiled at the effect. “It belonged to the old man?” I sidestepped admitting I had on a dead man’s hat by saying yes; I argued it really was the old man’s now with Jared gone, but I was sorry I had said it, sitting there in the wind wondering in a flash of sadness if I hadn’t been sidestepping one thing or another all my life, compromising, bending, escape hatch always more or less ajar, behind me always at least one unburned bridge. I said, “Might have been Jared’s,” and felt a little better.

I was glad to have it anyhow. The air was colder than in the morning; maybe the wind had changed or we had swung more into it, or maybe the tide did reach up that high and was running out and we were making more speed. It seemed to me there was a sea smell in the air but I thought that was hardly possible. We must have been a long way from the coast, though certainly a good deal closer to the Sound and the salt creeks and estuaries that I remembered fingered up innumerably into that land, making it as hard to separate ocean and continent as night and day.

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