“What?” It was my turn to be bewildered.
“Your dirty trousers there. Give them to me. I’ll wash them, and I’ll let them out and bring them back to you.”
I was tempted. But, “No. Anyone who saw them would know to whom they belonged. Amzil, until I can clear my name, you must not be associated with me. Now. Thank you. Go and do as I said.”
She looked down at the floor. “Nevare, I—” She stepped suddenly forward, and I thought she would hug me. At the last minute she extended her hand and patted me timidly on the arm, as if I were a dog with an uncertain temperament. “Thank you,” she said again.
I moved away from the door, and she fled. I watched her go, a small woman hurrying down the dirt road, away from the cemetery and toward the town. I yielded to an impulse, bowed my head, and asked the good god to look after her.
I hadn’t had an opportunity to buy food. Despite everything else that had happened, I was ravenous again. I drank my tea, trying to swallow my hunger with it. Then I methodically secured my house. I closed and latched the shutters of my window. I took my disreputable weapon down from its hooks on the wall and prepared five loads for it. Then, scowling, I prepared an additional five. I hoped against hope that I’d never have to use them. Perhaps, I thought sourly, I’d be lucky, and if a mob came to drag me from my house, this ancient derelict of a gun would blow up and kill me quickly.
Ebrooks and Kesey came to my door before they went back to Gettys for the night. They were sweaty and tired and looking for a few moments of talk and a cool drink before they began the walk back to town. I let them in, and watched them dip up water from my cask. The room was small, and while they were in it, they filled it with their noise. They talked about how much grass they’d cut and what they had to do tomorrow as if it all were of tremendous importance. It was trivial and meaningless to me. Dead soldiers and their wives and children were all rotting back into soil, and the soil grew the grass, and these two men would cut it to make the cemetery look tidy, and then more grass would grow and they would cut that, and more folk would die and we would bury them. I thought of the body that had been stolen and how outraged I’d been, and all the effort I’d put into recovering it. What if I’d left him there, a soldier whose name I didn’t now recall, and the tree roots had penetrated his body and the beetles and ants had carried off his flesh? How was that any different from burying him in a hole and marking the spot by writing his name on a plank of wood? I thought about what I’d claimed as my life, that I would call myself a soldier and guard the place where bodies were buried. And I would do this because I was the second son my mother bore, and therefore I must wear the king’s uniform on my back and, at least ostensibly, serve him.
It was all so meaningless when I looked at it that way. It was meaningless in the same way as when I stood up from a game and then looked down on the scatter of playing pieces, and realized that they all were just bits of polished stone on a wooden board marked with squares. All the meaning they’d had moments before when I’d been trying to win a game were meanings that I’d imbued them with. Of themselves, neither they nor the board had any significance.
I could not decide if I were just a playing piece, or if I’d finally stepped far enough away from the game someone else had made of my life to discover that I no longer wished to be a playing piece. I shook my head as if I could rattle my own brain, trying to find my way back to my own world where all these things were accepted and important and mattered.
“Something wrong, Nevare?” Ebrooks asked me abruptly. I realized that both he and Kesey were looking at me oddly. I’d been staring sightlessly out the window. Now I looked at them. Their faces were damp with sweat and smudged with dirt, but their eyes seemed genuinely concerned.
“You know what they’re saying about me in town?” I asked them.
Ebrooks looked away and said nothing. Kesey looked stricken. It was enough.
“Why didn’t you say something to me?” I demanded.
“Aw, Nevare,” Kesey exclaimed, “We know that ain’t true. You ain’t got that kind of mean in you.”
“I hope not,” I said. “I just don’t understand how a rumor like that could get started, or why so many people would be willing to believe it.”
“Well, it’s how you are, you know,” Kesey said ponderously. “Living out here, all alone, near the forest. And being, you know, big like you are. And no one knowing much about you. It just, well, maybe it makes it easier for them to make up something about you. You ought to come to town more often, drink with the boys, let ’em see you aren’t so strange.”