IT WAS RAINING in Kingdom County. The wind blew out of the west, off the Green Mountains, and the rain came riding in on the wind, falling steadily on Gran’s piney woods, bringing out the evergreen scent, falling on the scarred and ruined meadow by the river and on the brook that ran down the mountain, washing worms and bugs into the current, so the brook trout would bite like crazy in the morning, falling tick tick tick on the license plates Bill had used to patch the octagonal barn. E.A. lay in his loft bed and listened to the driving rain and thought over the events of the day. He decided to count his family’s blessings and thank Our Father for them, just the way Gypsy had taught him to. They had a falling-down house that they were cannibalizing for stove wood and a rig named Patsy. They had an eight-sided barn patched with license plates of places he longed to see, a barn where, on rainy days, he liked to read books like Kidnapped and Huckleberry Finn and to practice throwing his red rubber ball through the tire swing. He, personally, had the largest collection of Red Sox baseball cards in Kingdom County, also the leftover hide of an official American League baseball, also a Green Mountain bat with a cracked handle. He had a pretty young ma who wrote beautiful songs about wildwood flowers and knocked-up girls, who pitched him BP and took him fishing and stripped down to her birthday suit and did the River Dance on Devil Dan’s earthmoving machine in the broad light of day and, even now, as E.A. was counting his blessings, was sitting in the front parlor dressed as Little Nell, the Queen of the Gold Dust Saloon, drinking assorted Twining teas with Corporal Colin Urquahart, in his full official regalia, from the RCMP barracks in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Corporal Urquahart was known more familiarly to E.A. as Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Besides being one of Gypsy’s most faithful clients, the jovial Mountie was a great favorite of Ethan’s, bringing him air rifles and ice skates and hockey sticks and fishing rods, and E.A. was thankful for him, too. For all these blessings, E.A. thanked Our Father, tacking on a request that He reveal the name of Gone and Long Forgotten, if not now then soon.
E.A. went straight from counting his blessings to reciting Our Father Who Art in Heaven. He had never been exactly sure what “deliver us from evil” meant, but he assumed it had something to do with revenge. Gypsy had enjoyed revenge that morning, setting R.P. on Devil Dan and the Blade. E.A., however, still had a score to settle. He and Dan weren’t even—not by a long shot. He would dump a ten-pound sack of Shurfine sugar in the gas tank of the Blade. He would set fire to Dan’s machine shed with the Blade inside it. He would shoot Devil Dan with Grandpa Gleason Allen’s deer rifle and hang him up by his little feet in Gran’s dooryard maple like a deer.
E.A. began again. “Our Father who art in heaven . . . thy kingdom come . . .” Thy kingdom come must be Kingdom County, Our Father being somehow connected with the Colonel. E.A. no longer supposed that the Colonel actually was Our Father, or his father, either. But the Colonel had been as much a father to him as anyone had. The Outlaws, Earl and the boys, were more like indulgent uncles, or grown-up brothers, than fathers. Thinking about brothers sidetracked E.A. yet again, because he wished he had one, or even a sister. He seemed destined tonight not to get to the end of his prayers, so finally he just slammed through the whole shebang without thinking what any of the words meant, adding a quick P.S. wish for Gypsy to find a good man, like Randolph Scott or Jimmy Stewart in her song “A Good Man Like Randolph Scott or Jimmy Stewart Is Christly Hard to Find These Days,” and a P.P.S. for Gran to get her Series ring at last and be easier to live with, and finally for Devil Dan to fall off the Blade and get squashed under its treads like the official American League baseball.
“All in the fullness of time, boy,” the Colonel’s voice said as E.A. started to drift off, feeling happy and thrice blessed and dreaming of revenge and baseball.