The Antelope Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

the lakes deepened. Abruptly there began vast lumbered areas of rotting pine stumps surrounded by springy popple. He feared his father didn’t know where he was going and had forgotten where he’d murdered the harmless old woman.
    “Here is the place,” said his father at last. He put down the cracker tin. “Here is where I betrayed the silent light in which I was raised. Here is what desire made of me, and foolishness, and an irresistible and bloody impulse.”
    Scranton lay down in some poison ivy.
    “Cut my throat, please,” he said to Augustus, and handed his son the whetted knife he kept in his belt.
    Augustus kept the knife and spoke gently to his father. “Let time do its work,” he said. “Perhaps you will be pardoned.” Eventually he convinced Scranton that they must travel to the place where the Indians had fled.
    “Where did they go?” he asked.
    His father pointed in all directions. Augustus chose north, and again picked up the cracker tin.
    The Ones
    Inevitably, they crossed paths with Indians.
    “Are these the ones?” asked Augustus.
    His father looked carefully at the people, but shook his head and said no, that the people he’d killed were beautifully dressed in calico, buckskins, beads and strips of velvet. They’d been strong and well fed. These two people were skinny and ragged and they walked with a discouraged air. The man frowned and the woman glared suspiciously at the two white men.
    “I think these are the ones,” said Augustus, who longed to put down the cracker tin. “I think these are the children who survived, all grown up. Look what you did to them, father!”
    “My Lord,” said Scranton Roy.
    He took the tin of money from his son. As the people edged away from the two, he held it out with an awful smile and pressed it forward.
    “That’s all right,” said the woman. “We don’t need crackers.”
    Scranton’s sleeve was rolled up and she looked at his arm, then nudged her husband, who craned his head sideways and carefully mouthed the letters of the word.
    “All right,” said the Indian man, startled. “You can follow us. We don’t have much to eat, but we’ll shoot something. We live over there.”
    He pointed at a place that seemed empty. Augustus, sensing that he’d soon be relieved of the tin, followed eagerly so that his father was forced to stumble along behind.
    Old Shawano
    The man who read the word scored into Scranton Roy’s arm was named for the southern wind, just like his father and grandfather. Shawano. His wife was Victoria Muskrat. They knew about the old woman who was slaughtered and they knew about the woman’s great-nieces. Shawano had taken them after their mother disappeared. They were pretty girls but something was not right about them. Victoria thought they were coldhearted liars. Shawano said he pitied them, but did not trust them. The two white men and the Indians now ached to be delivered of different burdens. Both of the old people hurried along, sensing that they soon might be relieved of the girls’ disquieting presence.
    The Number Blue
    When the number two in any of its permutations entered Augustus Roy’s thoughts a limpid blue atmosphere surrounded it. The color darkened, tinged with indigo, as it climbed into the solid sky of twoness. Entering the tar-paper and scrap-board house of the people to whom he was determined to give the cracker tin, he saw the spectrum of blue that went with the number when he saw the twins. Zosie and Mary were identical. They dressed alike in flour-sacking frocks, gray with white piping, and they both wore their hair pulled back in long braids. Their eyes were cool and watchful. Their hands moved constantly at endless tasks that they took up and put down without seeming to notice. Augustus was too shy to look at them straight on, but he was moved by their uncanny harmony.
    His father seemed dazzled, struck dumb. His clothes had grown huge around him and he sat in a puddle of cloth, itching already