What He Carried

The truck came at four.

It was a milk lorry, white and rattling, with a farm's name painted on the door, and the driver, a woman in her sixties in a man's wool cap, took one look at the two soaked boys on the verge and swung open the cab. She did not ask who they were. She gave them a thermos of coffee and a bag of doughnuts, and drove them forty miles through the dark to a town with a bus depot, and let them out on the curb with a pat on each shoulder.

"Don't know what you're running from," she said. "Doesn't matter. You'll be all right."

They stood and watched the taillights go.

At the depot, they separated.

It was done quickly, in the glare of a vending machine, in the smell of floor polish and old coffee. Leo had a ticket to Cincinnati. Cassian had one to Iowa, bought with the last of his savings. The two buses stood at different bays, engines idling, exhaust curling white in the cold. Nobody was about. A man in a uniform slept in a chair.

"I'll write," said Leo.

"You can't."

"I'll find a way."

"Leo."

"I will." He stood with his bag at his feet, in the borrowed coat, with his hands in his pockets. In the harsh light he looked tiny and gray and about twelve. "I'll be somewhere. I'll tell you if I can. If I can't, if..." He stopped. "Then you'll know."

"I'll know what?"

"That it was worth it. To come."

Cassian could not answer.

Leo stepped forward. He put his arms round Cassian's middle and pressed his face into his chest, once, hard, like a child, and let go. He turned. He walked to his bus, with his shoulders hunched and his head down, and went up the steps without looking back.

The doors folded shut.

Cassian stood on the curb until the bus pulled out, and went on standing there for some time after.

…

He reached Ottley on the following afternoon.

Dana met him in the corridor. Dana, with her hair pulled back and her eyes ringed with sleeplessness, who cried when she saw him, and held him, and took him in to see his mother. His mother sat up in bed, against the pillows, and held out both arms. Daniel sat beside her, with his cap in his hands. He got up when Cassian entered, and shook his hand, hard, without a word.

He sat on the bed. He told them he was sorry.

He told them nothing else.

He didn't tell them about the chapel. He didn't tell them about the hymn, or the knife, or the cold flat sound of the bolt going home. He said that the school had not suited him, and that he had left. He said that he was tired. His mother looked at him a long time with her dark, tired, perceptive eyes, and he saw that she did not believe a word of it, and that she was not going to ask.

"All right, honey," she said. "All right."

She drew his head against her shoulder.

It was warm there. He closed his eyes. He heard the soft ticking of the radiator and the hum of the ward and, under it, her heart.

He did not weep.

…

Edward was arrested in December, on the charge of assault.

It was Dana's doing. She had written everything down, for years, and when the boy came home she took the notebooks to the sheriff's office and laid them on the desk. It was not Deputy Burnell's desk. Burnell had been transferred, in November, to a county post somewhere in the north, with a handsome raise. His successor was a young woman who read the file twice and made two telephone calls.

Edward pleaded to everything. He did not look at Cassian in court. He stood in his borrowed suit with his big hands hanging, and when the judge asked if he had anything to say, he shook his head. They took him away in the morning.

Cassian watched from the back.

He felt nothing. He had thought he would. He had imagined it so often, the click of the cuffs, the heavy head bowed. In the dream there had always been a sort of warmth in it. In the courtroom there was only a gray tired plainness. It was a thing that had happened, like rain.

He did not mention the scholarship.

He did not mention what his father had said to him on the telephone, in the dark, in the last week of October. They wanted you. Everybody ate. He had known for a long time. It lay in him like a stone, with the others, and he carried it, and he said nothing.

…

He grew up.

There was nothing remarkable about it. He went to a high school in a little Illinois town and sat at the back. He worked in a hardware store. He got his license. He passed his exams. He took a degree in a state university, in a subject he did not much care about, and found a job in an office, and a flat with a view of a car park.

He slept badly.

Not every night. Most nights he slept like anyone. But in late October, every year, as the days shortened, the dreams came, and he woke at the seventh hour with his heart pounding and the taste of iron in his mouth. He would lie rigid on his back, in the dark, and listen to the silence. Sometimes, he thought he heard it. Very faint, very sweet, very far away, as if sung in another room.

Three voices.

A treble, a little flat. A tenor. And one more, lower, newer, that he never quite managed to name.

Cassian, they sang.

Come and hear.

Every year, he lay and did not answer. Every year, it was a little harder.

…

On the first of November, seven years later, a newspaper lay folded on the counter of a coffee shop. He picked it up to pass the time. On the fifth page was a small notice. BLACKTHORNE ACADEMY, HOLLIS CREEK. Admissions open for Michaelmas term. Scholarships available to boys of promise from disadvantaged homes.

He read it twice.

There was a photograph. A stone chapel on a hill, with a pale sky behind it, and a ring of pines. It looked, in the grainy newsprint, like a postcard. In the foreground a tall boy in a gray cloak was smiling at the camera. He was very fair. For a moment Cassian thought it was Silas, and then he saw that the boy was fifteen.

Cassian put down the paper.

He sat for a long time with the coffee going cold in front of him. The shop was warm and noisy. Somebody laughed. A radio played a song about a train. In the corner, a small boy of nine or ten was eating a cookie, with crumbs on his chin, and his mother was wiping his face.

He thought of a pen on a windowsill.

He thought of a bolt, drawn home.

He had got out. That was the fact of it, the plain and ugly fact. He had run when he could, and he had lived, and he had not looked back. And the thing that waited on that hill had not been broken, nor bound, nor even much disturbed. It had slept. It would wake. It would find another. And somewhere in a white-fenced Illinois house, a woman who loved him would never learn what her son had carried out of that place.

He could tell her. He could tell the police, again. He could go back.

He did not.

You can't save everyone, he told himself, as he had told himself a hundred times.

It was true. It was also not enough.

He got up, left a tip, and went out into the cold. The wind was from the east. It smelled of frost and woodsmoke and, faintly, of iron.

He had escaped.

And he would remember it every day of his life.

THE END. If you can’t live with what you carried out, turn back to Chapter 85 and choose again.