Bone House_ A Novel - Betsy Tobin [86]
“We will take the baby with us,” I say. “And return him to your mother.” Long Boy raises his head to look at me, his eyes filled with pain.
“She would not have me,” he says searchingly. “She would have the others. But not me.” Long Boy looks once more at the tiny infant and swallows. I hold my breath, glance behind me to the painter, who raises his eyebrows. I turn back to the boy.
“Long Boy, did you push her?” I ask gently.
He continues staring at the infant, his chest heaving from the memory.
“She ran from me,” he says. “She ran and ran . . . and then she fell.” He looks up at me, tears in his eyes. “She did not want me anymore.”
And then his meaning dawns on me, for in my arms I hold the devil’s child, and it is both his brother and his son.
The painter gathers up the bedclothes and the remaining food and, with me still carrying the infant, we begin our descent. Long Boy follows soundlessly behind us. Slowly we edge our way back along the crevasse with the painter in the lead and Long Boy bringing up the rear, his face impassive, as if in a trance. As we near the bottom I pause and turn to see that he has stopped several yards behind. He turns back and begins climbing toward the cave and I call to him, but he is moving swiftly, purposefully, and does not respond. The painter, too, pauses and we exchange a worried glance. Perhaps Long Boy has forgotten something, though the cave appeared empty when we left it.
He reaches the opening and does not stop, but continues past it, clambering along the crack in the rockface. From there it narrows until it provides barely more than a handhold, but he moves easily, hauling his giant frame across the rockface like an oversized insect. The rock rises another twenty feet from the level of the cave entrance, and we watch helplessly as he reaches the top and hauls himself up over the edge, disappearing from view.
I shout his name from down below, and my cries bounce against the sheer rockfaces, mocking me. We wait in silence for a moment, hoping he will reappear, knowing that it is pointless to follow. Even if we were to find him, he is far too strong for us to restrain. We wait in silence, can hear nothing now but the trickle of the stream below, and the deathly silence of the forest.
And then he reappears atop the ridge some distance downstream, where the rock reaches its highest point, perhaps a hundred feet above the streambed. He moves forward to the edge of the cliff and I watch in knowing horror as he contemplates the water far below. I call to him one last time and he does not appear to hear, does not even glance in our direction. And then I see him raise his arms and cast himself forward, as if he were a giant bird, soaring down across the rockface, plummeting toward his mother far below.
He lands facedown on a bed of jagged rocks that line the water’s edge, and we watch in horror as his blood slowly mingles with the icy waters of the stream. The painter slowly edges back toward me, reaches out a hand and pulls me to him, for I stand frozen in the crevasse, unable to tear my eyes from Long Boy’s lifeless body. I clutch the infant tightly to my chest, as if by doing so, I can still preserve its life. But they are all dead now, the mother and her sons, and there is nothing I can do.
Later, I sit upon the bank and watch as the painter drags his body from the rocks onto the snowy shore, laying him facedown. I no longer feel the cold, feel only the weight of the tiny child in my arms. Somehow she must have known it was the boy’s. I can only wonder what must have gone between them: the mother with the body of a thousand women, the child with that of a fully grown man.
Chapter Nineteen
We leave him there facedown upon the icy banks and return to the village with the dead child still locked in my arms. This time it is the painter who leads me through the forest, for I have no more consciousness than a sleepwalker. He takes me straight to the alehouse, and I stand by the kitchen fire unable to speak while Mary gently pries the