The Color of Night Read Online Free PDF

piebald flanks. It was the horns that attracted him, me too I’ll admit. He made me help wrestle the half-rotting head back down the hill and through the brush into our yard. Both of us too proud to puke, just barely.
    The Mom-thing went completely crazy: a screaming, slobbering, falling-down fit. Terrell took the rap for it, claimed the whole thing was his doing, while I crept under the porch and hid behind the crisscross lattices. She made him swear he’d dump it back wherever it was in hell you found it. In fact he only carried it across the creek out back and stuck it on an abandoned pump-house where nothing could get it for a month or so, till finally it was rotted dry and bleached clean enough for him to sneak it up the back stairs of the garage.
    You could pull the horns off then. They came away easily from the porous bone. Each was a foot and a half long, and curling. Inside there lingered, for years and years, the faintest smell of rot.
    I wasn’t much good at finding stuff, but I liked going out with Terrell. I did find minié balls sometimes—there were such a lot of those from the old battles of the War Between the States, sunk in the furrows like dead seeds. A time or two Terrell dropped an arrowhead ahead of where I was going to walk, plain out in the open where I’d be sure to find it. I knew that he had done that, but I didn’t say.
    Water maples screened the campsite on the riverbank. Through the trees we could smell the freeze-dried stroganoff that Dad was heating on the Coleman stove, while the Mom-thing, doubtless, worried about water moccasins and wished that she could take a bath and curl her hair. It would have been early fall, I think, with the leaves just changing on the trees. Fat purple berries buttoned pokeweed, and the fencerows were thick with sumac turning the colors of rust.
    We were walking a field that had lain fallow for at least a year. I wouldn’t have noticed that at the time, but Terrell would. I remember now the hummocks of old rows we stepped across, decaying corn-stubble overgrown with weeds. Terrell started along the fence posts, eyes tracking the ground at the edge of old turned earth. I went the other way, across the open space.
    In opposite directions, we quartered the field, then finally turned back to meet each other in the middle. It must have been fairly dim by then—the fireflies were starting to come out—so it’s sort of surprising either one of us saw it, much less both at the same time. The stone tip breaking the dirt beneath a corn tussock like a fin. Maybe a flaked edge of it caught the remains of the light.
    This is ours, Terrell said.
    Not mine, mine! None of that old tug of war. Both our hands covered the stone blade, but with a kind of reverence. We knew already it was different, special. The stone was different from all our other points, black, smooth, and darkly shining. It had been made in a distant place, before it was carried here. Out of darkness and old night. A firefly winked phosphorescent green as it walked among the fine pale hairs of Terrell’s forearm. I could feel the warmth of his hand spreading toward mine, across the obsidian blade. We did not yet have all our secrets on that evening, though they were coming near.
    When we had been much smaller, really small, Terrell, playing Indian, used to take me out in the woods and tie me to a tree. He’d go off for a while, not long I think, then return in the role of some frontiersman for my rescue.
    I don’t remember anything, really, about the time in between.
    The Mom-thing whined and fretted when she learned about it. It’s not natural. It’s not right. Daddy brushed off her objections. Kid stuff. They’ll grow out of it. It was normal, Daddy told her, and maybe, up to a point, that was so.
    Up to a—
    Terrell didn’t have much of a narrative for this game, or if he did I have forgotten what it was. The binding and loosing was exquisite. A throb that moved deep from the core of me and