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possessed an enormous contempt for the writtenword and those who would decipher it.
    That year the old man fell to beating him when the notion struck him, and it struck him more often as time drew on. Young Tyler grew wary and careful and watchful as a cat. All his movements seemed provisional and subject to change at a moment’s notice, he seemed always poised for flight.
    A schoolteacher who’d befriended him came once to visit. She sat for a time under the malevolent gaze of the old man, glancing about with nervous skittery eyes. She never came back. You better quit hangin around them goddamn schoolteachers, he said, wiping a hand across his mouth. Grayyellow stubble flecked with ambeer and spittle. Washedout blue eyes veined with meanness. You won’t amount to a goddamned thing.
    It was a summer of storms that year. Lightning walkedthe ridges all that July and August and conjured out of the night in strobic configuration stormbent trees writhing in the windy rain. Images of heightened reality rendered instantly out of the flickering night then snatched so instantly back into the absolute darkness they seemed never to have existed at all.
    After the old man beat him he’d flee into these windtossed nights. Something in all this chaos seemed to find its counterpart in his own chaotic heart and he’d turn a face stained with blood and tears into the remote heavens and defy the lightning to take him, to char his heart and boil the blood hammering in his veins and seize and short the circuits in his head but this was not to be. Once he followed a light through sheets of windy rain, and in the riverbottom a lightningstruck pine burned like a solitary candle flaring down the night. Set there like a sign to read could he but decipher it. Then he quit crying altogether and took the beatings he couldn’t escapewith a kind of stoic and sullen outrage.
    In his fourteenth year he heard the old man’s step on the stair and snapped the thumbbolt. The steps ceased and there was no sound anywhere save the whippoorwills measuring out the dark. He was holding his breath and waiting for the steps to start their descent when the old man’s shoulder abruptly slammed against the door.
    He was sitting on the cot with his back against the wall and his arms laced around his knees. He figured the lock to hold. The lock did, but on the third stroke of the old man’s shoulder the top hinge gave and the very door itself toppled into the room with the old man athwart it like some demented carpetrider and Tyler was out the window and gone. He went hand over hand down a trellis crept with ivy with the ivy tearingaway in handfuls and the trellis itself tilting away from the wall like a toppling ladder, and he jumped the last few feet and was up and gone into the cedars.
    The wind that night was out of the south and warm and balmy and there was a smell of freshly turned loam on it. From the sanctity of farther woods whippoorwills were calling each to each and he walked on toward them.
    This time he just kept on walking, as if the boundaries of his world had suddenly dissolved and the landscape before him become limitless. He crossed thin dark woods with light falling in broken shards about him and owls calling inquiringly and when the woods ended fallow fields began so white in the starlight they appeared ghostfields. He went on in a straight line, steering by the stars. Through a cornfield so dry with ancient autumns he moved steadily in a conspiratorial whispering of cornblades and finally out of anything at all attended by men and he guessed he was in the edge of the HarrikinHe came to a creek or river and waded into it. When his feet lost the bottom he drifted downstream awhile then dogpaddled to the far side. He climbed a bank strung with honeysuckle slick black in the moonlight and through such a heady reek of their blossoms he seemed drunk on them and he staggered on.
    Daylight found him where he’d never been. He went down a bloodred