The Third Hill North of Town (11 page)

Her throat closed with grief as she imagined Cerberus—trusting and gentle—coming to say hello to Rufus on the road. She could picture his little body being lifted into the air, all the while wagging his thin, whiplike tail as fast as he could. He would have tried to lick Rufus’s fingers; she was sure of it.

Her paralysis lifted, and her grief was subsumed by rage. A red haze filled her brain and she began to pant.

So help her God, she would make the man pay for what he had done.

She snatched a brass candlestick from the kitchen table and charged straight at the living room door, murder in her heart.

In the entryway, meanwhile, Eben’s face, too, had gone white with fury at Rufus’s words. But the response he’d intended to utter (“Get out of my house, you son of a bitch!”) died on his lips as he heard Julianna coming.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” he muttered, paling.

He spun away from Rufus and hobbled into the living room as quickly as he could. He was sure his bum foot wouldn’t allow him to intercept Julianna before she appeared, yet he had to try.

Rufus stood in the doorway, perplexed, and watched Eben lurch away from him across the living room floor. He didn’t know what reaction he’d expected after telling the uppity cripple what had happened to his dog, but this wasn’t it. He took a hesitant step into the house, trying to decide if he should chase Eben down or just leave.

He had no time to do either.

Julianna burst through the living room door, brandishing the candlestick. Her face was deranged and her eyes were wet, and she didn’t even glance at Eben as he made a desperate attempt to grab and restrain her. She darted around his outstretched arms and flew directly at Rufus, screaming like a Pawnee warrior.

Juliannna was tall for her age, and quite strong, and she had speed and courage to spare. She also had the element of surprise on her side, and was insane with anger and shock, and was wielding a heavy brass candlestick as if it were a mace. In addition to all this, her nickname was, appropriately, Amazon, and she was intent on meting out justice for what had been done to an innocent creature she had loved unreservedly.

And had it been anybody else she was after besides Rufus Tarwater, these things might have mattered.

Rufus was indeed caught off guard by Julianna’s wild assault, and it was a measure of her wrath that he took a step backward in concern as she flung herself at him. Rufus was not an easy man to frighten, and retreat was not in his vocabulary. But Rufus had been raised in a family that regularly employed unpredictable tactics of warfare, and his survival instinct kicked in just as she swung the candlestick at his head. He caught her wrist with his left hand, and with his right fist he struck her, full in the face.

Eben Larson watched his daughter crumple to the floor, and he rushed to her defense, crying out her name. He knew he stood no chance against Rufus, but he hated the man and he loved the girl, so there was little else for him to do. Julianna’s nose and mouth were bleeding and she wasn’t moving, and Eben flung himself at Rufus with the same abandon his youngest child had just displayed.

Had he been more agile, things would likely have gone much the same for him. At the last second, though, his limp caused him to stumble, and before he could engage Rufus in his own useless assault, the cavalry arrived: Julianna’s older brothers, Michael and Seth, materialized on the porch behind Rufus.

Michael Larson was seventeen, his hero was Copernicus, and he wanted to be an astronomer. He didn’t really have the makings of an astronomer, however, because he couldn’t stay awake more than an hour or two after the sun went down. His “observatory”—a telescope on a tripod, beside an old crate he used for a seat—was in the hayloft of the barn, but each evening after supper when he went out to study the stars, he began yawning immediately, and soon would feel the need to stretch out in the hay until someone came to fetch him. Michael’s older brother, Seth, was nineteen, and though easily the most serious of the Larson children, he had a smile that could thaw an iceberg, and an appealing sense of whimsy to go with it. (Thanks to Seth, the scarecrow in the cornfield was dressed as Kaiser Wilhelm, with a spiked, Pickelhaube helmet constructed of a chamber pot and a chess-piece bishop.)

Michael was six foot one and blond, Seth was slightly taller and dark haired, and both were sunburned and sweating as they came up behind Rufus Tarwater that Saturday morning in June. They had been working in the hayfield to the west of the house when Rufus rode by on his horse, and they had decided to come home, just in case Rufus took it into his head to cause their father trouble, as he had the last time. As they drew closer they’d heard Julianna screaming, and so had sprinted the rest of the way. They were not so fierce as Julianna, but they were tough, lean, and brave, and more than willing to defend their father and sister with their lives. Nor were they stupid. They knew it was Rufus Tarwater they had to deal with, so they had taken an extra moment to stop at the barn for weapons: Michael was carrying a pitchfork, and Seth had a metal fence post in his sturdy hands.

Rufus’s fist was raised to strike Eben, but Michael’s voice stopped him cold.

“Hey, Rufus!”

Rufus hadn’t heard them coming, and he spun around, startled. His red face, which was full of glee at the prospect of beating up Eben Larson, became markedly less cheerful as he gawped at his new opponents. Unarmed, the Larson boys would have been no match for him, either, but with no weapon of his own, he was now at a serious disadvantage.

He spat on the floor by Julianna’s feet and tried to bluster. “I’m gonna shove that pitchfork up your ass, boy.”

He’d be damned if he was going to back down from a fight with a couple of scrawny kids and a cripple.

The pitchfork shook a little in Michael’s hands. But after he shot a quick glance at his unconscious, bleeding sister on the floor, and another at his father, standing guard over her body, his hands steadied.

“Come on and get it, then,” he answered. His green eyes, large and bright like Julianna’s, were unblinking. “I’ll be real happy to give it to you.”

Seth raised the sharp end of the fence post so it pointed at Rufus’s forehead. “How’d you like to spend the rest of your life looking like a unicorn, Rufus?”

Rufus wasn’t sure what this meant, but it sounded uppity, so it enraged him. He wanted nothing more than to grab the post and beat Seth to death with it, but there was no way he could do this without first being impaled by Michael’s pitchfork. He clenched and unclenched his fists and tried to think of what he might do to even the odds, but nothing sprang to mind.

He swore in frustration, and the boys could smell the moonshine on his breath.

“Why don’t you chickenshits put down them toys?” he growled. “Fight me fair and square.”

Eben spoke from behind him. “Like how you just fought my fifteen-year-old daughter, Rufus?”

His voice was quiet, but there was something in it Rufus didn’t care for at all. He flushed, but kept his eyes on the weapons pointed at his head and stomach.

“I only hit her ’cause I had to, Larson,” he muttered. “The little bitch attacked me.”

The pitchfork and the fence post darted nearer to his body.

“Don’t call her that!” Michael ordered.

Eben Larson was no hothead, yet he was perilously close to telling Michael and Seth to go ahead and stab Tarwater. Julianna was breathing, but her eyes were still closed and her nose appeared to be broken, and Eben badly wanted to punish the man who had done this to her. Besides that, Rufus had also admitted to killing Cerberus, and Eben feared what else the crazy son of a bitch might do if he were allowed to walk away from this confrontation unscathed. There was a strong possibility he’d feel that Michael or Seth needed a comeuppance of some sort for having had the temerity to threaten him today.

We could say that Rufus went berserk, and the boys had no choice but to run him through,
Eben thought.
There’s not a soul in town who’d question that story.

It was an appealing notion, and he went so far as to fantasize about it for a few seconds. But then Julianna began to stir on the floor, and his native decency resurfaced. He sighed, knowing he couldn’t go through with it. As much as Rufus deserved retribution for his actions, the problem was in this instance he
had
acted in self-defense. Julianna had been doing her level best to kill him when he struck her, and that was a fact. And though Rufus had been far too rough with her, she appeared to be mostly unhurt. Seeing this cooled Eben’s temper, and allowed him to think straight again. The last thing any of them needed was for Julianna to wake up with Rufus still in the house: She’d just go after him again, and to save her the boys would end up with blood on their hands, losing their innocence forever.

Eben took a deep breath, and then another.

“Get the hell off my porch, Rufus,” he said, tiredly. “Just go on home.”

Rufus blinked. In his experience, situations such as this were never resolved without a lot of bloodshed, and he had fully expected Eben to tell the boys to skewer him. It’s what he himself would have done, had their positions been reversed. To be sure, he was enormously pleased by Eben’s decision, but he smirked at Michael and Seth to conceal his relief.

They saw his expression and their faces turned mutinous.

“We can’t just let him go, Daddy,” Seth protested. “Let’s at least tie him up, okay? Mikey and I will guard him, and you can take Julianna to the doctor and call the sheriff.”

Eben shook his head. The only phone within miles was the one at the telephone/telegraph office in town, and Sheriff Burns was in Hatfield. It would take forever for Burns to arrive, and once here, he could do nothing. Rufus couldn’t be arrested for defending himself against Julianna, nor given aught but a slap on the wrist for killing Cerberus. Aside from this, Eben wasn’t about to leave his boys alone with Rufus Tarwater, even if the man were hog-tied. He might find a way to get loose, and there was no telling what he’d do.

“Just let him go, son,” he said, resigned. “It’s for the best.”

Rufus barely even registered Eben’s words. Seth’s last suggestion was still churning through his brain, and he could focus on nothing else.

Coincidence is fickle, and thrives on chaos.

When Rufus was seven, his brother Frank had tied him to a post behind their barn and gagged him, then left him there for nearly five hours. Rufus had messed his pants and screamed himself hoarse through the gag, but no one had come to release him until his father at last stumbled across him while feeding the chickens. Tilson had set him free, but had laughed at him, and done nothing to Frank by way of punishment. Rufus had never felt more helpless, before or since, and he’d sworn to kill the next person who tried to tie him up like that.

As the eldest Larson child had just proposed to do.

“Put that little pigsticker down, boy,” Rufus hissed. “See what happens.”

He almost didn’t care if he got stabbed or not now, but he wanted to make sure he lived long enough to get his fingers around Seth’s throat.

“Shut up, Rufus, and go home,” Eben demanded. He knew nothing of the line Seth had just crossed in Rufus’s mind, of course, but he heard the intensified anger in the big man’s tone and it scared him. “Michael, Seth, back away from him right now, but keep your weapons ready.”

His sons did what he asked this time. They had sensed the sudden shift in Rufus’s mood, too, and Eben’s alarm was evident. Yet Rufus didn’t budge for a long moment, even after they cleared a path for him to leave. He swung his head from side to side like an infuriated bull, hoping if he waited a few more seconds the boys would give him an opening he could exploit.

We’ll see about this,
he thought, livid with rage.
We’ll see who ties who up.

Michael and Seth showed no sign of relaxing their guard, however, so he finally snarled a string of obscenities at them and stalked off the porch. He kept up this outpouring of impotent curses until he reached his horse on the other side of the yard, but once back in the saddle, an odd, disquieting change came over him. His font of foul words ceased in midsentence, and he sat still on the beast for nearly a full minute.

His face was flat and unreadable as he studied the two-story Larson home. His gaze took in the living room window, the swing on the front porch, and the storm cellar door on the south side of the house with equal attention; he seemed to be no less interested in the paint job (white with blue trim) than he was in the rain gutters and the windows. He gave no indication of looking for anything specific.

When he had finally completed this slow inspection, he nodded in an almost friendly manner at Michael, Seth, and Eben, who were all watching him.

None of them moved a muscle in response. The sun glinted off the tines of Michael’s pitchfork as Rufus at last dug his heels into the horse’s flanks and galloped away.

No one spoke until he disappeared over a hill by Clyde Rayburn’s place.

“Christ,” Seth muttered at last, unnerved. “What was that about?”

His dark hair was wet with sweat as he set the post down on the porch. He glanced over at his younger brother first, and then back at Eben and Julianna.

Eben had knelt beside Julianna. Her big, green eyes were open again, and Seth wondered how long she had been awake. The blood on her upper lip and chin made her look ghastly, but she managed a trembling smile as their father took her hand.

“You shouldn’t have let him go, Daddy,” she murmured. Her smile fell apart. “That man is a monster.”

She had been conscious long enough to see Rufus on his horse, looking at the house, and something in his brutish face had frightened her out of her wits.

Eben nodded. “I know, sweetheart,” he whispered. “I know he is.”