“He died,” said Luke, “and she died and I ain’t too keen to remember.”
Cap Leech had lost the thermometer. He felt in his pockets, nothing, not a gelatin pill; and he was cold, seated in the bow of a leaky rowboat. Below him lay the empty house with windows uselessly slammed shut at the first warning of the cannon. From one tight sash there floated a wisp of curtain. Inside, a mattress hung in suspension a few inches from the second floor. Behind the house the orchard’s tree — transplanted it had never bloomed — remained preserved in the backyard of the lake and waved dimly in its branches the staves and wire of a corselet, the stock of a buffalo gun, a lidless cradle; all tied into the tree for safety, inconceivable that the water could climb that high.
“I been alone since then,” said Luke.
Cap Leech stared at the unfamiliar back of the young man drawn up comfortably atop the drowned farm. And he, who by the spoonful or on his handkerchief had shared the opiate slipped to his patients, felt a sudden unpleasant clearness of the head, faced with the foundling plainsman. The first man had died in Eden, they pronounced him dead. And now, with brightening eye, he found himself sitting in the middle of the washed-out garden’s open hearth.
“Boy.” Suddenly he leaned close.
He stared at the tufted head that never turned, at the nape of a soft formed skull the seams of which were not yet grown together, at the lump of ending nerves that was his neck. Man, boy, shard, Cap Leech thought of his eye dilating by its own design, a mean spring opening with surprise, thought of the red rash that would creep along his arms at night from now forward. Within the brainless cord of spinal fluid there was a murky solid, a floating clot of cheerless recognition.
Cap Leech took off his spectacles, wiped, then bent them. He cocked his head, favoring the swelled side of his temple, and in the darkness began to grin through sixty years of accumulated teeth, cut to the gums. Slowly and with the faintest whispering, Cap Leech laughed, his tongue by slight movements pushed and licked each sound, a grim airless ripple so soft as to be hardly heard.
“Watch out, Lampson,” hallooing across the water, “watch out for him!”
The boat bubbled at the sides, tipped and sank twenty feet from shore in front of the bystanders, with keel curled and disintegrated, left the men to step out of it under water. They waded to the landing. In single file all stooped and climbed to the top of the hill through the gray ash, the lagging Cap Leech walking with hands clasped behind his back.
“If you had kept quiet,” said Camper shortly, “I would have caught one.”