He pulled his hand out of the dirt and sat with his knees bunched to his chest. The pistol was in his waistband, the edge of the hammer pinching his side. With a squint and a bit of imagination, he could discern the cabin. Locus of those night terrors of his childhood. Why had he been forced to cross the gulf between the bedrooms in the dark to wake his parents? Why hadn’t his mother, in her celestial understanding, come to him? Why hadn’t she known the loneliness washing over him in those empty hours? It was selfishness to ask this, he knew, and yet the feeling had never left him. Even now he hoped his mother would walk out to find him in the field and guide him back to his bed. What kind of man felt this way? This cowardice was what had permitted Landry’s death. The truth was that there was nothing in him worth saving. He was a disgrace.
He touched the soil again, knowing he would not be present when its bounty was revealed, knowing he would not see the look of subtle delight on his father’s face, apparent only in the intensity of his gaze upon the plants, an expression radiant with that distant love he dispensed with such parsimony. After a silence, he would pronounce the peanuts puny, unlikely to be purchased by anyone, before backtracking and declaring: They will do. It was his father’s quintessential move: embracing his failures to maintain a sense of ambition. But this life—quiet, respectable, replete with meager rewards—would not be Caleb’s. No. His own journey, he was determined, would take him elsewhere, to whatever paltry salvation he might find beyond this place.
He started toward home. The darkness was still almost impenetrable, but he felt one with it, as though he were wading weightlessly through water, and it struck him that his time spent alone, all those long hours in his room with the blinds closed, had conditioned him for this very moment. He entered the cabin and placed his foot on a familiar floorboard, stepping on it like the sole key to a piano, relishing the noise one last time.
Without another pause he went back down to the cellar. He could locate the trunk by scent alone, the wafts of cleaning grease that lingered in the air from decades past, before he was even born. The rifles lay waiting. He slung one over his shoulder, not even certain of if it still shot. His recklessness was of a piece with his frame of mind. What was most important was to keep moving—to follow the urge that had woken him and brought him this far.
The stars were out, small bright chasms that scarred the darkness, yet he did not need them to find his way. Stage Road would do just fine, for he could see the path in his mind already: carrying him through Old Ox, past the quiet square, empty but for a few drunken vagrants; spitting him out at Mayor’s Row, right before Wade Webler’s mansion. It was not where he meant to end his journey, but it was where he would begin it.
*
He knew, without knowing, that the Weblers slept soundly. This was another long-held notion of his—born of nothing more than the narrative he’d hatched, years earlier, of what it would be like to sleep beside August for a night, under a white sheet, basking with him in the lambency of the moon; to wriggle an arm free from under his pillow and fasten it, as if guided by a dream, around August’s torso, pulling him close, both of them granted permission for their bodies to do as they pleased until morning.
The frame of the dream had never extended beyond August’s bedroom. But Caleb had to assume that Wade and Margaret slept with the same peace of mind that possessed their son. He could envision Wade moored to his side of the bed, unstirred by the day that had passed, or the day that would come tomorrow, given over to his rest like a newborn in its crib. And perhaps that was the great ill of the world, that those prone to evil were left untouched by guilt to a degree so vast that they might sleep through a storm, while better men, conscience-stained men, lay awake as though that very storm persisted unyieldingly in the furthest reaches of their soul.
He paused before the mansion, a few feet removed from the hedges, still in sight of August’s window. Habit was strong. Yet the urgency of the moment wicked it off him now like a sweat. He forced himself to move through the gate and walked around the side of the home, winding his way past the cistern and on to the stables.
The aisle there was pitch-black. He hadn’t been inside the stables for years, and the misremembered place was nothing like his dreams, where candles projected onto the walls the lurid shadows of the horses and the other boys, specters bent on cheering his humiliation. Against that brutal romance, the heightened sense of wonder with which his fantasies were imbued, there was nothing special here. If anything, it was smaller than he recalled, and any majesty it held was obscured by the pungent smell of manure. How flawed his imagination had been in creating so much out of so little! He felt himself being freed from the delusion.