Darwinia

They sat together on the creaking front-porch of the house. Morning air came up the slopes from the bay, fresh as cool water and scented with growing things. Tom filled his pipe but didn’t light it.

Guilford said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yeah, you do. You also know I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important. So let’s not shovel too much shit, okay?”

“It’s been a quarter century, Tom.”

“It’s not that I don’t understand the urge. Took me ten years, personally speaking, before I broke down and said okay, the world’s fucking up and I been tapped to help fix it. That’s not an easy thing to believe. If it’s true it’s fucking frightening, and if it’s not true, then we all ought to be locked up.”

“We all?”

The frontiersman applied match to bowl. “There are hundreds of us. I’m surprised you don’t know that.”

Guilford sat silently for a time in the morning sunlight. He hadn’t had much sleep. His body ached, his eyes ached. Just about twelve hours ago he had been in Fayetteville staring at the ashes of his business. He said, “I don’t mean to be inhospitable, but there’s a lot on my mind.”

“You have to stop this.” The frontiersman’s voice was solemn. “Jesus, Guilford, look at you, living like a mortal man, married, for Christ’s sake, and a kid in there, too. Not that I blame you for wanting it. I might have liked that kind of life myself. But we are what we are. You and Sullivan used to congratulate yourselves for being so fuckin’ open-minded, not like old Finch, making history out of wishes. But here you are — Guilford Law, solid citizen, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, and God help anybody who doesn’t play along.”

“Look, Tom—”

“Look yourself. Your shop burned down. You have enemies. The people inside this house are in danger. Because of you. You, Guilford. Better to face a hard truth than a dead wife and child.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have come out here.”

“Well pardon my hairy ass.” He shook his head. “By the way. Lily’s in town. She’s staying at a hotel in Oro Delta. Wants to see you.”

Guilford’s heart did a double beat. “Lily?”

“Your daughter. If you remember that far back.”

Abby didn’t know what the burly backwoodsman said to her husband, but she could read the shock in Guilford’s face when he stepped back through the door.

“Abby,” he said, “I think maybe you and Nick ought to pack a few things and spend a week with your cousin in Palaepolis.”

She came into his arms, composed herself, looked up at him. “Why?”

“Just to be on the safe side. Till we sort out what’s going on.”

You live with a man this long, Abby thought, you learn to listen past the words. There wouldn’t be any debate. Guilford was afraid, deeply afraid.

The fear was contagious, but she kept it tied in a knot just under her breastbone. Nicholas mustn’t see it.

She felt like an actress in a half-remembered play, struggling to recall her lines. For years now she had anticipated — well, not this, certainly, but something, some climax or crisis invading their lives. Because Guilford was not an ordinary man.

It wasn’t only his youthful appearance, though that had become more obvious — strikingly obvious — over the last few years. Not just his past, which he seldom discussed and jealously guarded. More than that. Guilford was set apart from the ordinary run of men, and he knew it, and he didn’t like it.

She’d heard stories. Folktales. People talked about the Old Men, by which they meant the venerable frontiersmen who still wandered through town now and again. (This Tom Compton being a prize example.) Stories told on the long nights between Christmas and Easter: The Old Men knew more than they said. The Old Men kept secrets.

The Old Men weren’t entirely human.

She had never believed these things. She listened to the talk and she smiled.

But two winters ago Guilford had been out back chopping firewood, and his hand had slipped on the haft of the old axe, and the blade had gone deep into the meat of his left leg below the knee.

Abby had been at the frost-rimed window, watching. The pale sun hadn’t set. She had seen it all quite clearly. She had seen the blade cut him — he had wrenched it out of himself, the way he might have wrenched it out of a slab of wet wood — and she had seen the blood on the blade and the blood on the hard ground. It had seemed as though her heart might stop beating. Guilford dropped the axe and fell, his face suddenly white.

Abby ran to the back door, but by the time she crossed the distance to him he had managed, impossibly, to stand up again. The expression on his face was strange, subdued. He looked at her with what might have been shame.

“I’m all right,” he said. Abby was startled. But when he showed her the wound it was already closed — only a faint line of blood where the axe had gone in.

Not possible, Abby thought.