The World More Full of Weeping (4 page)

Dean drifted toward them as they climbed out of
the truck, and the men gravitated to him. Some of them
glanced toward Jeff, but none returned his raised hand in
greeting.

The Dutch farmers, whose families had been among
the first to settle the valley, mostly kept to themselves.
They had their own church, their own meeting hall, their
own school for their kids. They mostly kept clear of town
politics, though Jan VanderWyck was a councilman serving
his second term. Most times, people only saw them at the
Harvest Festival, where one of their number was usually
crowned Harvest King.

Jeff was grateful to see them.

“Friendly,” Diane muttered.

“They're all just tryin' to keep their distance.” Charlie
turned to face them. “In case . . .” His voice trailed off and
he looked to the ground. “In case something goes wrong.”

The words fell like a hammer on Jeff's heart. For the
first time, he had a sense of the real stakes.

He realized he had not felt like there was a real problem.
He had been expecting Brian to rustle out of the woods
looking sheepish, having lost track of the time.

Like father, like son.

For the first time, he felt like that might not happen.

“Okay, everyone muster up,” Dean called. The Search and
Rescue team formed a loose knot around him — everyone
except Charlie.

“We don't have much time before dark, so we're gonna
hustle out before the truck gets here. We're gonna split into
two teams. First team is going to start here. Your search
perimeter is due north, between the east and west fence
lines. Second team is going to start out on the logging access
road and work south between the same two fence lines.”

Jeff turned away from the briefing, looked toward the
woods, starting to blur and darken in the slow-dimming
light.

He felt Diane step up next to him.

“He's going to be all right,” he said, without looking at her.

She didn't say anything.

After a moment, he heard the briefing start to break up.
He turned away to find Dean writing on his clipboard.

“What team should I be on?” he asked without waiting
for him to finish his writing.

Dean looked up at him and shook his head. “The home
team,” he said slowly, then shook his head more decisively
when he saw Jeff start to argue. “No, really. I need you here.
I need you close to the phone in case he calls. I need you
close to Charlie and the radios in case something comes up.
I need you here.”

“And you don't want me out there.” Jeff said the words
flatly, without emotion.

Dean pinched his lips into something that could have
passed for a smile. “If it were my son out there, Charlie'd
have me waiting by the phone.”

“Right.” Jeff looked at the ground. Helpless.

Dean touched him on the forearm. “You've got a lot of
good people out there, Jeff.”

“Right,” he said again, and Jeff turned away.

In the distance, he heard boots on gravel, doors opening
and closing, hushed voices. Somewhere, an engine started.
Somewhere, tires crunched on gravel.

That was another world, though. In his, Jeff was
completely alone, still and powerless, as the evening started
down.

“Where are we going?” Brian asked, clutching his knapsack
tightly as he followed the girl he had just met through the
tangled underbrush.

“You'll see,” she said, always a couple of steps ahead.

He kept one arm up near his face, sweeping branches
away, careful to avoid snapback. The sticks and brambles
were thick, and seemed to twist around his feet and legs.
“Dammit,” he muttered, liking the way the curse sounded.

She moved effortlessly through the rough thicket,
slipping between the branches and brambles rather than
moving them aside. No curses, no snapbacks, no tripping.

“Are we almost there?” he asked, trying to make it sound
like a joke.

“Hush,” she said in a stern whisper. She stopped and
turned back to him, making a show of pressing her fingers
to her lips. “You'll never see anything if you keep making
such noise.”

“Okay,” he whispered, nodding, feeling a little chagrined.
“Is it much farther?”

Her smile was bright, and she shook her head. “No.
We're here.” She beckoned him forward and held her hand
out to him.

He stepped up beside her and took her hand like it was
the most natural thing in the world. “What?” he asked.

“Look.” She cocked her head forward. “Listen.”

He leaned forward, conscious of her next to him, of
the warmth of her hand in his. He gently pulled aside the
brambles, listening hard, trying to filter out the sound of
his breathing, the beating of his heart.

He thought he heard something — something small and
quiet. He couldn't see anything, just a clutter of brown and
green, leaves and branches, and rich, loamy-brown cover on
the ground and —

There.

The coyotes were almost the same sandy brown colour
as the ground. If he hadn't slowed to look, he wouldn't have
seen them. If he hadn't quieted, he would have woken them
and they would have slipped away, unseen and unknown.

He was suddenly acutely aware of how much poorer his
life would have been had he never seen them.

It was a mother with three, no, four pups, piled in a loose
pack of slumbering brown fur. He was close enough that he
could have reached out and touched them. He smelled the
rich, feral wildness of them, saw the faint patterns in their
fur.

“Wow,” he breathed.

A few feet away, the mother coyote's eyes opened, bright
yellow against the blurry brown.

Brian froze.

“It's all right,” Carly whispered, squeezing his hand.
“Stay still.”

He felt the coyote's eyes upon him, tracing him,
measuring him. There was a depth to the yellow eyes, to the
dark pupils, a caution and an understanding. When their
eyes met, it was as if something passed between them.

I won't hurt you
, he tried to say, without using his voice.

The coyote languidly licked her chops, sighed and
shifted herself within the pile of her brood. She closed her
eyes slowly, not looking away from Brian.

Carly pulled gently at his hand.

He waited until they were a good distance away before
he exploded. “Holy cow, that was amazing! Did you see her?
Did you see her looking at me?”

Carly smiled at his excitement. “I saw her.”

“At first I was scared. When she opened her eyes, I
thought she was — I thought she would protect her cubs.
But she just looked at me.”

“She could tell you weren't a threat. She knew you
wouldn't hurt her or her children.”

“That was so
cool
! How did you know she would be
there?”

For a moment, Carly didn't say anything. “There are
trails and paths that the animals use. You can follow them
if you look closely enough.”

Brian's
eyes
were
wide,
the
rush
of
excitement
thrumming in his veins. His hands shook.

She smiled at his reaction. “Would you like to see
more?”

He nodded. “Please.”

She took his hand again and led him away.

One of the ways you could tell that someone had spent most
of their life in Henderson was by how they approached
someone's house.

Diane would always go to front door, ring the bell, then
wait.

Most people would go around the back and knock.

John and Claire Joseph, though, just opened the back
screen door half an hour after the teams had spread out to
start the search, Claire calling “Hello?” up the stairs.

Jeff had been standing at the sink, looking out
the window at the people moving through the fields,
disappearing into the woods. He turned in time to see
Diane stand up from her place at the table and step toward
the doorway. She had been sitting at the table, staring into
the middle distance, her hands in front of her.

Claire Joseph climbed the stairs slowly, gripping the
wooden rail. She was old — Jeff wasn't sure just how old,
but he guessed in her eighties — but her eyes were bright
and warm.

At the top of the stairs she drew Diane in for an embrace,
clutching her tightly without saying a word. When she
stepped away, she held onto both of Diane's hands, looked
deep into her face.

Tears streamed down Diane's face, and Claire nodded.
“That's right. You need to get that out. You're wound up
tight as an old watch-spring.” She looked over at Jeff, and
he tried to smile. “Let's get you cleaned up,” Claire said,
leading Diane gently down the hallway.

Jeff watched his ex-wife disappear into the bathroom,
the door clicking closed behind them.

“I brought over our big coffeemaker,” John Joseph said
from the foot of the stairs. He was hanging up his coat,
several plastic grocery bags at his feet. “And some of Claire's
cookies. I thought we might make up some sandwiches as
well.”

Jeff stepped partway down the stairs and John passed
him the bag containing the coffee tureen.

“I didn't hear the truck,” he said as they climbed the
stairs.

John shook his head. “We walked across the field. Your
driveway looked pretty busy.”

“Thanks for bringing all this stuff,” Jeff said as he
unpacked the bag on the kitchen counter, plugged the cord
into the base of the tureen. “It never occurred to me.”

“Your mind's on other things.” John took a couple of
cookie tins from the other bag and set them on the opposite
counter.

“Yeah.”

John looked out the window over the sink. “We're getting
into the gloaming now.” He turned to Jeff. “Twilight.”

“They won't be able to see too much out there.”

“They've got lights. Good ones.”

“Yeah.” In the window, the world was gradually
disappearing, being replaced by his distorted reflection.

Carly walked Brian to the edge of the forest, where the
undergrowth was thin and the paths were clear.

She hadn't said anything since he told her that he needed
to be getting home. Even in the perpetual shadows of the
deepest woods he could tell it was getting late.

“I'll come back tomorrow, though,” he said, thinking
back on the day they had spent together, and ahead to
Sunday morning. There was no other way he would rather
spend the hours.

Her face brightened at that.

“Where should we meet?”

They had walked in silence through the forest. It was strange: if anyone had asked him that morning, Brian
would have told them that he knew the woods as well as
he knew his own house. Better, maybe. But Carly knew
paths he had never noticed, knew clearings and fallen trees
and swamps bright with skunk cabbage he hadn't even
known existed. With her, the woods, which had always
seemed comfortable and familiar, seemed to grow, to take
on a wondrous strangeness, a foreignness that was kind of
unsettling, but mostly thrilling.