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By Root 434 0

stood for a moment, looking at him, thinking if there was something he needed to say, then he turned and stepped out of the office into the fenced yard. It was already beginning to warm up, the sun risen higher in the sky, the sky completely clear and blue. He walked out past the cattle yards, where the fat cattle were all feeding at the plank troughs at the fences, and walked out onto the gravel road, headed south toward the highway two miles in the distance. There were fields of corn stubble along the road, and small birds flew up from the ditches, chittering as he approached. A pheasant cackled from across the stubble. When he reached the highway he stood at the roadside, leaning against a signpost, waiting for a ride to come along.

Half an hour later a man in a blue Ford pickup stopped beside the road. The man leaned across and rolled down the window. Bud, where you headed to?

Denver, Hoyt said.

Well, get in here. You can ride as far as I’m going.

Hoyt climbed in and shut the door and they drove west toward town. The man glanced at him. What you gone and done to your face there?

Where?

Your nigh ear.

I wasn’t looking and snatched it on a tree limb.

Well. All right then. You got to watch that.

They drove on and passed through Holt and went west on US 34. The highway stretched out before them, lined on both sides by the shallow barrow ditches. Above the ditches the four-strand barbed-wire fences ran along beside the pastures in the flat sandy country, and above the fences the line of telephone poles rose up out of the ground like truncated trees strung together with black wire. Hoyt rode with him through Norka and as far as Brush. Then he got another ride and traveled on, headed west on a Monday morning in springtime.

42

IN SCHOOL THAT MORNING THE CHILDREN WERE DISCOVERED almost at once. One of the young girls in Joy Rae’s fifth-grade class, a girl who had been briefly interested in her weeks before when she had appeared at school with lipstick on her mouth, slipped up to the front of the room in the first hour of classes and addressed the teacher in a voice scarcely above a whisper. The teacher at her desk said: I can’t hear you, come here. What is it you want?

The girl leaned next to the woman’s head and whispered in her ear. The teacher studied her and turned to look out into the classroom at Joy Rae. Joy Rae was bent forward over her desktop. Go back to your seat, the teacher said.

The girl returned to her desk at the middle of the room and the teacher rose and walked as if on some routine inspection out among the rows of students, and stopped near Joy Rae and then caught her breath, raising her hand to her mouth, but collected herself immediately and led Joy Rae out into the hall and down to the nurse.

The little boy, her brother, was called in from his classroom.

Then, as before, against their will and despite their protestations they were examined in the nurse’s room. The boy’s pants were lowered, the girl’s dress was raised, and seeing what she saw this time the nurse said angrily: Oh Jesus Christ, where is Thy mercy, and left to bring the principal into the room, and the principal took one look and went back to his office and called the sheriff’s office at the courthouse and then phoned Rose Tyler at Holt County Social Services.

THE CHILDREN WERE QUESTIONED SEPARATELY. PHOTOGRAPHS were taken and a tape was made of their remarks. They each gave the same story. Nothing had happened. They’d been out playing in the alley and had scratched their legs.

Honey, Rose said, don’t lie now. You don’t have to lie for him. Did he threaten you?

We scratched them on the bushes, the girl said.

Her brother was waiting beyond the door in the hall, and she was standing before the cot in the nurse’s room, her hands twisted in the waist of her thin dress, her eyes filled with tears. Her face looked red and desperate. Rose and the sheriff’s deputy sat across from her, watching her.

What did he threaten you with? the deputy said.

He never done nothing to us. The girl wiped at her eyes and glared at them.