By the time Warren turned onto Agony Hill, it was nearly seven. The Churches’ bull was at the other side of the field, barely visible though the evening haze.
The night was warm and fair, the kind of summer evening Maria had always reveled in. She liked to go out for supper on nights like this, because it was too hot to cook and because she loved to walk through the streets of the North End seeing people she knew in their summer clothes, drinking wine at outdoor tables. Sometimes, they would go to her parents’ restaurant, where they were greeted like royalty, sometimes not, since her parents didn’t have a large patio. Maria, who had only lived in Italy for a few early years of her life, had always said that Italian summer evenings must have imprinted themselves on her brain because she lived all year for balmy nights. Warren remembered holding her hand as they walked, the feel of her hip bumping his, the smell of her lemony face cream.
The cows gathered silently at the edge of the paddock to greet him when he got out of the Galaxie. He looked up at the barn. He was still wondering if someone might have climbed down from it, but looking at it again, he saw it was indeed impossible. The boards on the outside were completely smooth. You couldn’t climb down and it was too high to safely jump. You would need a ladder. And of course they had not seen a ladder.
But maybe there was a ladder hidden away somewhere and Sylvie Weber had lied.
The sky was turning pink and orange over the distant hills. When he knocked on the door, no one answered, so he turned the handle and opened it slightly. “Hello? Mrs. Weber?” he called out. Again, no one answered. He pushed the door open a bit more and stepped inside. The house was cool and smelled of burnt butter. He called out again, for cover, and quickly crossed the entry hall to the door leading to the kitchen.
He wanted to understand more about the family before he asked Sylvie Weber about the box from the vet supply company. He had the feeling that she was hiding something and he wanted to get a better sense of her before they talked. The kitchen revealed her as an unenthusiastic housekeeper, he thought. It wasn’t squalor, exactly, but there was a pleasant mess in the place, dishes in the sink, but likely only from today, a baking pan on the top of the large cookstove that revealed the source of the burnt butter smell. The stove was warm to his touch.
On the kitchen table, someone had placed a jug of wildflowers, tall colorful stalks of black-eyed Susans and a white flower he didn’t know the name of. Something about it was pleasing to him and he had the surprising thought that if he were a painter, he would paint the arrangement.
He was not a painter. Indeed, he’d never done anything creative in his life, but he appreciated those who did. He loved to go to the Museum of Fine Arts and look at the paintings.
Mail littered one end of the table, but he didn’t dare touch it. Instead, he turned to the wall above a small table pushed against the far wall of the kitchen. It seemed to be a work table, as it was covered with blank sheets of paper and a small milk bottle that contained a few sharpened pencils. Someone had been writing poems in the same hand as the ones he’d seen taped up around the house.
Flitting tiny flies, someone had written on one sheet. That was it for that page.
His eyes wide, full of the forest’s secrets, read another. The city washes from him in the trees’ deluge. “Deluge” had been crossed out and “raining freshness” written instead. It was the next line that made anxiety run through him. White shirt, rumpled like bedclothes, the black tie a city scar, he emerges as in a birth, damaged, innocent, no longer lost.
He’d been wearing a white shirt and black tie the day he’d been lost in the woods.
Was this poem about him?
Now, his explorations felt different. He searched the wall above the table for evidence either way, but the papers pinned there were shopping lists, reminders, bills that needed to be paid. Hugh Weber’s letters to the editor were pinned there too, the latest one carefully centered on the wall with an air of pride. The poems were scattered as an afterthought.
In the living room, he looked around at the furniture, a mixture of shabby pieces and really good-quality antiques, and then walked through to the dining room, where someone seemed to be organizing papers; there were stacks of them, bank statements and electric bills and typed correspondence, everything lined up neatly on the floor next to a large bureau.
He called their names again, to cover his snooping, and was about to look more closely at the piles when he caught movement outside the large window and saw them out there, Sylvie Weber and the children working in the vegetable garden. Quickly, before they saw him inside, he went back out the front door and around the side of the house to the garden.
It was impressive, a large plot the size of a small house, with different sections for tomatoes, greens, tall stakes with brown vines winding around them. Sylvie Weber was using a hoe to clear weeds from between two rows of what looked like spinach. The boys were spread out across the garden, one picking tomatoes, two crouched on the ground pulling weeds. In the gloaming, it all looked like a French painting, the bruised sky and the dark figures, out of time in their undefinable clothes.
When she looked up and saw him, he saw fear cross her face. She put the hoe down and started walking toward him, a hand up to shield her eyes, though it wasn’t bright anymore.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. Weber,” he called out. “I wonder if I could have a quick word.” Behind the lines of the fence, her face was washed with golden light. She looked staggeringly beautiful. He felt suddenly self-conscious of his clothes, his shoes, his body. She nodded and he heard her say to the boys, “Finish up in here and then go bring the sheep back into the barn before it’s dark. I heard howling last night.”
She wiped her hands on her dress, picked up a basket, and looked at him one more time from behind the fence before coming around through the gate and meeting him on the other side. The sun had dropped farther toward the horizon—indeed, it seemed to be gathering speed, hurtling toward the tops of the hills, leaving the sky bloody behind it, the red and purple spreading out across the expanse. They couldn’t help themselves; they stood and looked at it until it seemed to be fading and then she wordlessly led him back toward the house.
They had shared it, the beauty of the sunset, which would never be repeated, and he felt tied to her.
It was darker inside now and he waited in the entryway until she switched on a lamp in the living room and led him inside. In the kitchen, she put the basket of vegetables next to the sink and filled two crystal glasses from the spigot in the wide sink. She handed one to him and led the way back to the living room. Then she motioned for him to sit on the sofa and took a seat in the armchair.
When she looked at him expectantly, he stammered out, “Are—are you feeling better? I expected to find you resting.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Don’t worry, I let the boys do the difficult work. I was just showing them what to do.”
He smiled. “I won’t tell Dr. Falconer then.”
She smiled back. “Thank you. He’d worry but I’m fine, really. It was just the heat Saturday, and the stress of Hugh’s brother saying those things. Mr. Hatchett brought us some hay and he said Victor had an accident. Do you know what happened to him?”
“We don’t know yet, but he should be okay. I heard from the hospital before I drove up here. He didn’t try to contact you, did he? About your husband’s accounts?”
“No, but we don’t have a phone. Mr. Williamson drove up today to tell me that Hugh had money.” She looked away, embarrassed. “That’s where the checks came from, Mr. Williamson said. Hugh never told me, but anyway, we won’t have to leave the house, which is good news.”
“It is good news.” He hesitated, not sure how to start, not sure how to address the issue of the box.
Surprising himself, he couldn’t keep from asking, “How did … how did you and your husband meet?”
He needed to know, not for the investigation, though perhaps it was important to that. But it was just that he was curious.
She frowned and said, “My father had a farm in Derby, near the border. That’s where I grew up. My parents came over the border and my father worked on the farm, as a young man. Then the owner died and left it to him. He went back to Hatley and got my mother. She didn’t speak any English when she came, or later really. My father was a smart man, though he hadn’t had much schooling and there were nine of us.” She smiled. “Too many for what the farm could produce. I was seventeen. I’d just had my birthday. I’d left school and was working at a shop in Newport. My father drove me and my sisters in to work each day. One day, a man came in. He was interested in me, in what I did, where I was from. I was reading a book and he noticed and…” She looked up. “He told me he liked to read books and write and when I told him I did too, he asked me all kinds of questions. He listened to me talk about the poetry I liked. He was thirty-five years old, but I didn’t think about that at all. He was quite smart, had been to college. And he was very interested in my life on the farm and what I knew about animals and crops. He wanted to have a farm, you see. He said he was going to buy one.”
She took a sip of her water.
“He came back a few times. We talked. He said he had a lot of books and he could give me some. He was planning on buying a farm in a town called Bethany. I’d never heard of it, but he made it sound nice. We … I don’t know. We spent time together. He wanted me to come with him, but I said my father wouldn’t let me go if I wasn’t married. A couple of days later, my father said Hugh had come and asked if he could marry me. My father said yes. I … was happy to go to a new place, to live with books.” She shrugged, her face blank. “That was it. I had Scott before the year was done.”
Warren nodded and sipped his own water.
Finally, he said, “Mrs. Weber, I need to ask you about the man who we think set the fire up at the camp. We think you might know him. We think you gave him something, cans of food maybe. Is that right?”
Sylvie Weber sighed heavily, turning her face so that the light from the lamp put her in profile. Her hands went, automatically, he thought, to a basket next to her chair. There was a piece of knitting, a bright blue length of stitches that he supposed would be a scarf or the sleeve of a sweater. It was some kind of comfort to her, something to do with her hands. She seemed to think better of it, though, and left it alone. Finally, she said, “I didn’t tell you about him because I couldn’t see how it mattered. He doesn’t want to be found, you see, and no one asked me about him so it’s not like I was lying.”
Warren tried to keep his voice calm. “No, of course not. No one’s suggesting that. It’s just that we need to know about him, in case he had anything to do with all of this.” He spread his hands around at the house, the farm, hoping to encompass all the terrible things that had happened since the first terrible thing, the fire that had taken her husband’s life.
“He didn’t have anything to do with all of this,” she said. “I promise.”
“Maybe not, but we need to know about him,” he said, a little sternly, as though she were a child. “When did you, well, meet him?”
She turned to him and said, “It was back in the beginning of the summer. We’d been haying. First cut. I’d taken the boys swimming down by the brook. There’s a swimming hole there. It’s the best place to swim because the water comes right down and it moves so quickly it never warms up.” She smiled. “On a really hot day, it’s the only way to cool down, you see. And it’s all green and … wonderful there. I looked up and there was a man standing there, watching us. He told me to come up and talk to him. He had a knife and I thought … I thought he was going to hurt me … or us, but when I got up there, he said he was sorry, he didn’t mean to scare me, it was just that he was hungry. He had been living in the woods and he’d tried eating some plants he found, but they made him sick.”
“Did he tell you why he was living in the woods?” Warren asked her.
She smiled. “Yes, the poor boy. He said he had come to Bethany to live with some friends, but it ‘hadn’t worked out.’ From what he said, I think it might have been Jeffrey … Mr. Sawyer’s farm. He didn’t seem to want to talk about it. He asked if I had any food scraps I could give him and he asked me not to tell anyone he was here. He said he’d go away if I could just give him some food. He had found a place to stay.”
“When was this?” Warren asked.
“I would say around July first. Just before the fourth anyway.”
So he’d possibly been living at the camp for a month before the fire. “What did you say?”
“I told him I’d send one of the boys back with some food. I felt sorry for him, so I filled up a box with some old cans of beans and peas and corn we had. Then I added a big chunk of cheddar cheese and two loaves of bread. Hugh had just baked them and I had to make up a story about one loaf falling in the sink and getting wet. Andy took it down to the brook and gave it to him.”
“And you trusted him, you trusted that he wasn’t a danger to you or the boys?”
She laughed. “Yes, he was … I don’t know quite how to describe him. He’s just a boy, really. His clothes were … I don’t know. He was wearing city clothes that were all … ruined and a wool hunting jacket that was too big for him. He was sweet, just hungry.”
City clothes. He studied her in the low light. One hand was absentmindedly rubbing her belly and a piece of her dark hair had fallen over a cheek. Was the poem he’d read about this other man then and not about him at all? He felt an absurd flash of jealousy, deep and painful. Warren realized with horror that he found her beautiful, desirable, that he couldn’t stop looking at her, at the details of her face, her neck, her hand …
He cleared his throat and sat up straighter in his chair. “You use the present tense, Mrs. Weber. Have you seen him since then?”
“Just twice. It was a lot of food, you see, and maybe he’s gone.” She looked away.
His voice was harsh when he said, “I don’t understand. I don’t understand why you didn’t tell your husband. Was Hugh violent? Did he beat you?” He wanted the surprise of it. He sensed there was something about the relationship she wasn’t telling him and he thought he could get a reaction out of her this way.
Her eyes were direct on his. “No, it wasn’t like that. You see, when I realized that the boy had been living out at Brook’s End, I knew if I told Hugh he’d just start worrying about it, thinking about it too much. Anything about Jeffrey bothered him, got inside his head sort of, if that makes sense. If he even saw him for a few minutes, in town or at the auction up in Fairlee, he’d stew about it for days, drink too much, get furious about little things. So it was better not to mention anything having to do with Brook’s End at all.”
“Had he seen Sawyer recently? Your husband?”
“No. And that was why I didn’t want to tell him about the boy. I thought he’d forgotten, maybe.”
“But why didn’t you tell me about the boy? Why didn’t your sons?” He couldn’t keep the fury out of his voice. “I asked you if there had been anyone around, if anything strange had happened!”
The look she gave him almost broke his heart. She was scared of him, her eyes wide and full of fear. “He said he couldn’t get called up. He didn’t think he’d survive it,” she whispered.
He saw it then, the boy, traveling north, away from a letter telling him to report for his physical, or perhaps just the newspaper stories about the increased quotas. Had he been on his way to Canada? Warren had heard of men who did this. No one he knew. His own letter from the Selective Service had come right after he had accepted the job in Vermont and he had been exempted on the basis of his profession. But there must have been no exemption for this boy. Now that they needed more men over there, there would be even fewer exemptions. Somehow, the boy had hooked up with Jeffrey Sawyer and then he’d ended up starving in the woods.
“You won’t turn him in and make him fight, will you?”
“That’s not my job. I don’t care who fights and who doesn’t. You don’t even know if he’s eligible. I only want to know what happened to your husband! If you see this boy again, you have to tell me. We’ll bring him in safely.” He could feel the frustration rising through his throat. “Mrs. Weber, what do you think happened to your husband?”
“I don’t know,” she said, in an exhausted way. “I don’t know, Mr. Warren.” She looked like she was about to cry and he felt, for the first time, her fragility. He knew that pushing her was going to lead to her giving her grief its way, perhaps for the first time.
He knew what it was like to keep grief at bay, the feeling when something finally gave it a channel. He let it go, thanked her, and they both stood. In that dark room, with only the weak light of the one lamp, he could feel her breathing, could see the outline of her body against the white wall when she turned. He was seized by an idea so mad that he put it out of his mind before it could even be articulated, and he was stepping away from her, getting as much distance as he could, when they heard someone yelling, “Ma! Ma!” and the front door slammed.
It was the second-oldest boy, the very handsome one, and he came barreling into the room, saying, “Flora, Ma, Flora’s leg is broken. She’s lying down in the field.”
“One of the ewes,” Sylvie Weber said to him before turning back to the boy. “How bad is it, Andy?”
“I don’t know. Scott said to come get you.”
She looked up at Warren “I’m sorry. I have to…”
He spoke before he’d thought it through. “Do you need my help? You shouldn’t be exerting yourself.”
“No, we’ll be fine.” He could see her reconsidering, though. “Well, maybe. If we need to carry her up, I don’t know if I can…” She touched her belly.
“Of course.”
“Andy, you get the flashlight from the drawer. Come on, quick.” As she stepped into the light, Warren could see the stress on her face. In the hallway, she opened the closet and rummaged, coming out with a rifle that she tucked under her arm. She took what looked like a few cartridges from a box on the top shelf and put them in the pocket of her dress.
Something pinged in his brain. He didn’t have time to chase it down, though, because the boy came with the flashlight and she was off and walking quickly through the door.
“You won’t need that, will you?” Warren asked as they walked, nodding at the gun. She ignored him.
It took them five minutes of walking in the beam of light for them to hear the other boys shout, “Over here,” and she started running toward the sound.
The sheep was on the ground, lying so still that Warren thought she might already be dead, but when Sylvie Weber put a hand on her leg, she jolted. The animal seemed almost in shock, her eyes staring in the beam of the flashlight. “It’s broken,” Sylvie said, trying gently to stretch it out, which made the ewe jolt again. When Warren looked down at it, he could see it was at a strange angle, the lower part of the leg bent and pointing away from the ewe’s body. He felt lightheaded, his stomach gone acid; he wanted to look away but he was embarrassed.
“Should we try to carry it up to the house?” he asked.
“No, there’s nothing to be done.” Her voice was quiet but commanding.
The boy holding the flashlight gave a sob and she went to him, putting a hand on his head, and then loaded the .22. The oldest boy, Scott, said, “Do you want me to, Ma?” and she quickly shook her head. Warren thought he saw relief on the boy’s face and something pass between them. He felt at sea. She was going to kill the sheep, right in front of him, in front of the boys. He wanted to protest, to stop this. “Why don’t you let me…” he started to say, intending to say that he would take the sheep to a vet, that he would pay for it if she couldn’t, but she misunderstood and handed him the gun.
It was heavy in his hands, too heavy. “Are you sure…?” he ventured.
“She’s in terrible pain,” she said. “It can’t be healed. There’s nothing to do.”
When he lifted it, he couldn’t get the balance right. The pool of light from the flashlight bobbed around the ewe’s head.
Scott held the animal still. Sylvie Weber knelt, awkwardly, and helped. “It’s okay, Flora,” she said softly. “It’s okay.” She pointed to a spot at the back of the animal’s skull. “Here,” she whispered. “Six inches away.” Warren tried to steady the .22. His brain was a hurricane, everything swirled and rushed. He felt dizzy and staggered back, the muzzle bumping against the sheep’s back.
And then, for the second time in two days, he saw Maria, the pool of blood beneath her, the way she had stared at the ceiling. Her eyes had been so familiar and yet so unrecognizable. He’d shouted her name over and over, as if he could call her back …
The vomit came up so suddenly he barely had time to turn away. “I’m sorry,” he said when he’d finished. “I can’t.” The gun had already fallen away and Sylvie Weber quietly picked it up. Warren’s eyes were closed when he heard the shot.
Warren and the oldest boy, Scott, dragged the carcass back up the hill and they wrapped it in a tarp. “Lenny will come tomorrow,” Sylvie murmured to the boy. He led the other boys back to the house and Warren followed her out of the barn and toward his car. She was quiet. He had to say something, but what could he say? He felt his shame like a too-warm sweater.
“Thank you for your help,” she said, starting to turn away, and before he knew what he was doing, he was reaching for her arm, holding her wrist, turning her back toward him. There was just a little light still in the sky and from the house. He could barely see her face. Only her eyes shone out of the gray murk.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “About before. I … My wife was killed. I found her. I … I thought of her and I couldn’t.”
Her eyes were huge, surprised. She nodded slowly, staring at him, and didn’t answer.
“I … I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to do it, with your … with, your condition.”
The night was crowding around them, the darkness thick and full of hidden things.
“It’s okay,” she whispered, seemingly spellbound. “I don’t mind killing, when it’s the kindest thing.”
He let her go and turned toward the car and by the time he had backed out of the drive and looked toward the house again, she was already inside, her figure moving in the lighted interior.