Part 7
Both men went down on the major counts. The sentence took a proceeding of its own. Janine came with the sweater Callie had left over a kitchen chair across her knees and a statement she had written over until the paper went soft where it folded.
Shaw asked her nearer the microphone; she took hold and set it where she wanted. “I am not going to tell you what she would have been,” she said. “I don’t know. Neither do you.” What she knew was a girl who sang under her breath hunting for her keys, who borrowed things without asking and gave them back laundered. “That is the whole of what I have,” she said. “I want it written down.” The room that had muttered through two days of argument sat still.
They offered Owen the chance to speak and he turned it down. Anything he said would come out of what she had come to say.
The penalty verdict was death for both, and Shaw entered the sentences. Nobody made a sound. On the steps a reporter asked whether justice had been done at last. Dutch shoved a nose under Owen’s wrist, Owen went down on his heels over a foot sound for months, and walked him to the truck.
The evidence boxes had come back and stood in the front room. He got one as far as the porch when a neighbor’s truck came off the speed at the lane end, a hand lifting behind the glass, not quite committed. He read the number inked on the cardboard until the road emptied, carried that one to the shed, and left the rest.
He slept in pieces. One night he woke hearing Callie say his name the way she said it when he was making them late, a hand on the phone before the rest of him caught up. Dutch took to lying across the bedroom doorway, and when a siren ran past he stood close enough for Owen to feel him shake.
They still walked in the Blackpine, but the ranging was over: the dog stayed inside thirty feet, checking back, and Owen let him set the distance. He had wanted the house to go back to being a house. It did not, that summer or the winter after it, and in February he called an agent.
The sign went up at the end of the lane in mid-May. Clothes were nothing. The kitchen he left until last, for the things that had never been Callie’s and had her on them anyway — the chipped blue bowl she used to fill for the dog went into a carton marked KITCHEN, and that one he carried out himself.
The new place was two counties west of Fenn, above Sage Hollow: tin over the porch, four fenced acres down to a creek shallow enough for Dutch to stand in and watch minnows come over his feet. No timber to walk into. For a week he waited for somebody to explain what was wrong with it.
Three days a week he fixed small equipment at the feed-and-seed, out of the house by seven. A customer asking the wrong thing at the wrong moment could still take the afternoon off him, and the owner, who once found him stalled over a carburetor he could strip blindfolded, took the counter back. In August he set a half-finished mower down, told a man in front of two others he needed a minute, and came back and finished it.
That was what put him in a church basement three towns over, twice, saying almost nothing. He went back because nobody made him account for himself. The third time he said he rehearsed easy answers until whoever asked moved off, and a man across the circle nodded once and neither filled the quiet. The meeting slip went flat on the dash with Thursday facing him.
The gate hinge he brought home stuck. He sat on the top step working it, a bowl by the post for the dog, who came slow out of the creek and shook it over the boards. Some nights since the move the hall light had burned till daylight. The pin came free and he reached for the rag.
His hands were not clean when a truck came in off the county road and Dutch stood up, ears going forward. It took the windshield swinging out of the light for Owen to put Dale Boyd behind it.
What came down out of the cab was a paper sack from the Bluebird and Dale behind it, a hand on the door for the dog coming off the steps. Dutch ran a nose along the pant leg and stood looking up.
“I got the address off your lawyer,” Dale said.
Owen had told Lindahl to go ahead without believing he would. Dale lifted the sack an inch, as if what was in it explained the drive better than he could.
“Janine made an apple pie. It was her idea, not mine.”
Cold pie after midnight, out of the pan, barefoot at that counter, and the one time he caught her she wanted to know if he meant to arrest her. It came up whole and unasked for, and Owen looked past Dale at the truck before he put a hand out.
“You can tell her it got here.”
“I will.” Dale watched the dog lie down across Owen’s boots. “That animal never did take direction.”
“He still doesn’t.”
Owen put the sack on the rail rather than keep holding it. There was a bench in by the lake now, Dale said — on the bicycle path she used to take out to the swimming rocks.
“Nobody would have to know you were coming,” Dale said. “Any Sunday.”
The lake was easy enough to put in front of himself. Harder was his own truck turning in, Janine already on the bench, the two of them working out what to do about the distance with every vehicle on that road going by.
“Let me sit with it,” Owen said.
“All right.” Dale turned for the steps. The offer was set down and left there, nothing asked of Owen to make it easier, and Owen was not ready yet to watch that truck head east.
“I have a pot made,” Owen said. “If you are not in a hurry back.”
The post let go of Dale’s hand. Before either could say the thing that would make it bigger, Owen was through the door with two mugs down and the pie cut. Folded into the sack, when he got to it, were a plastic knife and napkins. He stood over that much forethought a moment, then carried it all out.
They sat a couple of feet apart, the dog over Owen’s boots. Dale asked about the hinge and Owen showed him the pin. When the trial came into it Dale lost the thread partway, and Owen let him find his own way back.
What Dale got onto was Callie at six, and a crying fit so bad he turned the truck around. Three peaches off a roadside table while he paid for corn. Under her jacket to halfway home, then she gave herself up before he noticed anything gone. She would not let him do the talking; she went up to the woman with two peaches in her hands and the money for the one.
“Wouldn’t take a dime of it off me,” Dale said.
The squared shoulders came back to Owen whole, that business of settling her own accounts, and he laughed. One side of Dale’s mouth went, and he looked into his mug. What they had for a few minutes was something of Callie’s no detective and no jury had needed.
Owen stayed at the rail until the truck was past the mailbox, then took the mugs and the plate in and stood a minute in his kitchen with nothing left to put away. Outside, the light had gone long, and the creek down in the field kept catching it and letting it go. Dutch came up the steps like a much older dog and put himself down against the chair leg.
His hand found the notched ear without being sent. The calls he had not returned would be there tomorrow, and the letters he had no idea how to answer. Thursday he meant to make. What he had hold of was a dog putting his whole weight back against a palm, warm the length of his leg.
“You walked me out of there,” he said.
One knock of the tail, and that was the answer. Owen kept his hand where it was. The heat came out of the boards and went, and the sky over the benchland gave up its color a shade at a time. Somewhere in there the dog pressed against his shin, and Owen moved the chair over and stayed.