He looked for a moment at the eyes which still unflickering pointed toward the low door. He looked at the raised skirt and, hardly believing, at the mouth from which he had just withdrawn and through which in a single word the girl had spoken. The little vertical creases came again into his face. He stooped, moved, and obeyed, helping her up and to the door, down the steps and into the darkness where she disappeared to some earthen nest or hole where she would recover, packing the wound with clay, or not.
Cap Leech drifted to the front of the wagon where the red tipped springy shafts lay bent to the left, wheels stopped dead in an unfinished sudden turn, kicked the wood lightly and hunched off toward the out buildings. He stood still a moment in the black yard and, feet apart, hands in pockets, peered into the dizzy triangulated night. Between heaven and earth not a rattling cough as he moved and approached the barn.
Wood, sapless, creosoted, he smelled it briefly anchored to the leveled sand. Whatever grass there was grew like a fire at the edge of a ditch along the uneven beginning of the barn floor, a few blades trickling inward between cracks in the faintly urinated planks; a clump also at the bottom of one adjoining fence post. He looked up at, listened to, the open loft. A bundle of unused hay sat there across the brittle arms of a stored and dusty rocker.
Leech stepped toward the barn, away from it, knowing scarcely where to begin, but feeling all the while — there were cicadas under his feet, over to the rise a redolent horse face in the sand — as if he were treading a place of windgall. Back again, softly, he peered inside, craned. There were the bins and roosts, pigeon holes for the ghosts of an animal world under an unsafe roof, all the bitter windings of a fence to be restrung or left barbed in the corner; here he could listen to the twilight of newborn field mice or hide wrapped in a litter of old ropes.
He heard the strut of a rooster. And Cap Leech, hardly beneath the scratching rafter, turned to the moonlit yard.
It mounted to the light with unkempt saddle hack and broken spurs, with an aged flitting leapt between rails and sidled to a remembered mark in the clay. Black sickle feathers hung on the air. The rooster poked, flinched with one talon as if exactly picking over the spot for a certain needle or feeling for a white grain. The aggressive, powdery bird began to twist its neck, cocking the eyes into a startled question, and the wattles fell to the side of the head. Again and again it inflicted upon itself some senseless doubt as the unjointed finger swept over the ruts and maggots.
Then it threw back the stunted limb atop the skull and paced the diameter of the pond, stepping now and then into the blackness and reappearing on the opposite side to hark again toward the center. It dropped one long feather in its tracks from the thinning tail bunch. It could not stay for long in the ring nor too long in shadow, marched before the barn dusting the downy leggings.
The rooster suddenly began to run, a companionless skipping around the circle, and passed the barn each time with averted head and one lifted, rejecting wing. The spared fowl with the comb who could not crow sped with a lunacy to cover its path, and when it slowed at several quarters of the circle it appeared that it would stop on the other side of the yard and beyond reach of the red fox. But the end of the circle brought it to a standstill before the barn, motionless for breath. Then the scabious old cock walked deliberately to the wagon entrance.
Cap Leech was unable to spread his arms or retreat into the passage of webbed stalls. He waited before this dwarfed image, until as it drew close, indifferent now to watching beasts or stones in its way, it finally bumped his ankles and hurtled itself, the midget incubus, to the far stanchion with an imaginary thump.
The beak, the breast, the screw wound shanks and brass toes grew cold against his legs before the black ball flew from under his feet and he escaped the barn.