I passed out.
When I regained consciousness my arm was in a crude splint and somehow the old man had picked me up and laid me in the canoe. He stripped off his shirt and tucked it under my head and then climbed in the stern seat and got us moving in the current headed downriver. He had no paddle but guided the boat with his shifting weight and by pulling at an occasional low limb. With my head tipped up, I watched the canopy float by, the moonlight flickering through the leaf openings. I drifted in and out, afraid to close my eyes, trying to keep up with time. The river had gone quiet, as if the gun blasts had flushed out every sound. No bird call. No cricket. No night prey or predator. Only the sound of water sloshing intermittently at the edges of the canoe.
At one point Brown got out to push and then I felt the bow bump against something solid and we were back at my shack. With some help from my one sound leg, he got us up the staircase and inside. I lay on the slashed and tattered bunk and watched the dark room spin. Brown found a match, struck it with a fingernail and lit my kerosene lamp.
Somewhere he came up with a mason jar of water and held it to my lips. He sat in my one chair and I focused my eyes on him. The yellow light fell on one side of his face leaving dark creases in his leathery skin and setting his real age.
“S’pose she’s over now,” he said, his voice devoid of any trace of authority. I let the silence sit.
“You were part of it?” I finally asked, the words husking in my raw throat like dry gravel.
“I s’pose I was,” he said, looking past me. “It wasn’t nothin’ but talk at first. Them young ones sayin’ how the land was ruint an’ city folk was the cause. Course, we always knowed that. Same words been tossed ’round with whiskey for lifetimes.”
He was talking at the wall. The same stare was in his eye that I’d seen as he looked at the front of the cabin where the girl had lain and didn’t want to go inside.
“But these ones started talkin’ ’bout actually doin’ somethin’ about it.”
“Blackman, Ashley and Gunther?” I said.
“An’ some others at first,” he answered, feeding me more water and taking a sip himself.
“They wasn’t bad men. I hunted and fished with all of ’em at one time. But you know how some things will just catch fire and burn out fast and others will smolder on like the peat under the soil. It just burns on until it’s all black and burnt rotten.”
There was nothing for me to add. Sometimes it was beyond understanding. I’d seen groups of cops do it, talk and talk and talk. Then one or more would finally step over the line and there would be hell to pay for us all.
“Once them kids started turnin’ up dead, we all started lookin’ at each other. Some removed themselves from it. Some weren’t sure,” Brown said. “I guess one liked it.”
“But you didn’t know who?” I said.
He shook his head and looked down at the floor.
“I s’pected Ashley for a time. He was always an odd one. I tracked him some. Then I found him out at his place. The girl was inside. I must have chased Blackman off. Dave Ashley wouldn’t never of hanged hisself.”
The old man got up and stepped quietly outside. I coughed and it felt like ground glass in my lungs. When Brown came back in he had my bag in his hand. He set it down beside the bed and zipped it open and took out the cell phone.
“They gone have to come git you,” he said and put it near my good hand. I looked up at him.
“What about the knives,” I said, and thought about the one I’d buried in Blackman’s throat.
“I brung ’em home from the war,” he said. “I give a few out to some of my… acquaintances.”
He put the bag down next to the bed and turned to go.
“You might better keep that one there,” he said, nodding at the table where I could see he’d laid one of the German blades. Without another word he slipped out the door and was gone.
I lay in the flicker of the lamplight for some time. My head spinning with Blackman’s mad defense of