4.

Tod and Buz were outside in what was once an orchard, where the trees were lichen-covered and crooked over with time, their branches hanging low to the ground as if they were trying to re-enter the earth. They had left Mallory inside, cleaning the kitchen in an automatic, silent way, the dog tracking behind her as she moved.

'We can't just leave her here,' Tod argued, walking up and down across dead grass and snapping twigs. The fall sun was hot through the leaves and a scent of apples permeated the air.

'I'm not saying we should leave her here,' Buz retorted.

He stopped under a tree heavy with apples and began to pick the ripe fruit and put each one carefully into the old wicker basket he held on his arm.

'You think we should stay? We can't set up home here, Buz,' Tod said, glancing toward the house to be sure they weren't being overheard. 'You, me, the dog, and the crazy lady of Dakota.'

'She's not crazy,' Buz protested, thinking of the girl's dark eyes and tangled hair, and the words that spilled out of her mouth. 'She's just – I don't know – sad. Depressed or something. That's all.'

'She's living in an abandoned house with no food, waiting to die,' Tod said. 'That makes her pretty crazy in my book. We should take her to the hospital or something. Take her to someone who can help her.'

'She doesn't want that kind of help,' Buz said stubbornly. 'You know that. We've seen that kind before. You take them where they can get help, they run away. You take them back, they run away again.'

'So they lock the door,' Tod shrugged.

Buz glared. 'And then what?' he asked, anger surging up in him. 'They strap her down and do – do what? Electric shock therapy or something? Light her up like Broadway at Christmas time? That's always your answer, isn't it, Tod? Lock 'em up. Like you did to that boy in Nevada? If they don't do what you think's right you throw them through the door and lock it behind them? Is that it?'

'No,' Tod protested, holding up his hands. 'I don't want that to happen to her any more than you do. I don't mean that at all. But if she's a danger to herself, then – well, we've got responsibilities. We've got a duty to – '

Buz turned to another tree and started twisting apples from their stalks. He picked one that was half eaten into by insects and he threw it furiously into the undergrowth, gaining a small amount of satisfaction from the thud it made as it hit the ground. He boiled up every time he thought of that orphan kid that Tod had carried kicking and screaming back to his prison. That had come as close as anything ever had to splitting the two of them apart.

'How are you going to make an apple pie, with no flour and no fat and no sugar?' Tod asked abruptly.

Buz turned to him, still itching with anger, but Tod was smiling sheepishly, his arms held open as if in surrender.

'I wasn't going to make an apple pie,' Buz said with a shrug. 'I was just going to throw them in a pot, stew them up or something.'

'Well, we've got a little more bacon, some canned food, and not much else,' Tod replied. 'It's about forty miles to Elbow Creek. I can drive there and be back by dinner time with provisions to make dinner time into something more appetising than a mess of apples, bacon and canned potatoes. Just let me know how long we're planning on staying at this local Ritz, huh, so I know how much to buy?'

Buz smiled, the tension falling out of his body. They would never agree over that kid in Nevada – they would never agree over a lot of things – but this was Tod's way of making some kind of peace before another battle flared up. He was worried about Mallory too. Buz could see that.

'Will you give me a week?' he asked. 'After that, we do it your way.'

Tod nodded. 'I'll give you a week. I'll buy a few cans of dog food, too,' he said with a smile. 'But while I'm gone – see if you can find us somewhere better to sleep than on bare floorboards, will you? I want to still be able to walk by the time this week is out.'

'Get some soap, will you?' Buz asked as Tod walked away. 'Maybe some caustic soda or something too.'

Tod turned briefly, saluting jauntily. 'Will do, captain,' he said, before disappearing through the trees.

A minute later Buz heard the engine of the Corvette roar into life, and dust began to bloom through the air as the car crawled away from the house.

Mallory was still in the kitchen when Buz walked in, rubbing at the counter with a tired scouring pad, pushing a dirty puddle of water across the wooden surface. Buz stood silently in the doorway watching for a moment, then he purposely knocked his foot against the doorframe as he walked through, so that she would know he was there.

'Oh!' she said, turning suddenly.

'Sorry,' Buz said, jumping forward and grabbing at her bucket of water as she almost upset it. 'I didn't mean to scare you.'

'I heard the car,' she said. 'I thought perhaps…'

She trailed off, shrugging, an apologetic smile on her face.

'My buddy, he went to get us some food and things,' Buz told her. 'I figured we'd stick around for a bit, just to see you're all right.'

'All right…' she mused, looking up at him with a crooked smile. 'All right is a relative term, isn't it? Don't you think?'

Buz smiled. 'Everything's relative,' he said. 'I mean, the darkness of the shadows is relative to the brightness of the sun. The day's only the day because the night follows behind.'

'And what about the terminator?' Mallory asked reflectively. 'What about that point where one crosses from dark to light, from sunlight to shadow? You could get caught in there, don't you think? You could get addicted, not knowing whether to turn to the blinding sun or the sanctity of the shade. Shadows are kind things, like letting your feet down into the running water.'

'I'd take the sun,' Buz said. 'Er – Mallory – do you mind if I look about the house a bit? My buddy wanted somewhere softer to sleep, see. I promised him I'd try to find a better place while he was gone.'

She nodded, turning back to the counter and starting to scrub again.

'There's the big room,' she said. 'Upstairs, that door just to the right at the top. That's the big room.'

'There's a bed in there?' Buz asked. 'I mean, something intact?'

She nodded again. 'My mamma always bought the best beds,' she said.

'Your mamma?' Buz repeated. 'Then this is – ?'

'I was born in the bed in that room up there,' she said. Her fingers suddenly seemed very white and thin on the scouring pad, pressing with more force than was necessary since she wasn't moving the pad at all. 'My mamma lay there all that day and all that night. I was born in the shadows. I didn't come out until it got good and dark, she said. Just before dawn, I slipped out into the world.'

Buz stood in silence, just looking at her.

'This is your house?' he asked eventually. 'All this – '

'All this,' she nodded, gesturing toward the window. 'All one hundred sixty acres. The whole quarter section my great-great-granddaddy took all that time ago when the land was still hopping with jackrabbits and gophers and prairie chickens.'

'This house isn't that old?' Buz asked, looking about him. The place looked maybe thirty years old, but not a hundred.

She shook her head. 'My pappa tore it all down and built anew,' she said. 'He wanted the best place for mamma to bring me up. It was a good place,' she said slowly. 'It was a happy place. We were all happy here.'

'Mallory, what happened to your parents?' Buz ask carefully. He felt strangely afraid of what he might hear, but he had to know.

She shrugged. 'Pappa – he flew in B-17s,' she said. 'One day over Dusseldorf he went down. They sliced that metal shell apart like a cheese wire through butter. Went down in flames. He always wanted to climb mountains, but England was the only place he went. England and the skies above Germany. He never even touched the Alps. Just flew above them like an angel…'

'I'm sorry,' Buz said simply.

He looked at Mallory, trying to judge her age, to work out if she had been perhaps ten or fifteen at that time. He couldn't judge her. Perhaps she was thirty, perhaps twenty-five. In some ways she looked like a child.

'And your mom?' he asked.

'She just went away in the end,' Mallory said quietly. 'She couldn't be without him. She saw me through to college. I came back to see her just before graduation, and that was it. She'd gone then. I found her lying on the floor in that room back there. The parlour, she called it. She was becoming the carpet, becoming part of the house. They uprooted her and transplanted her in Elbow Creek. I wish they'd put her here, though – out in the orchard, under the trees. I should have told them to put her there.'

Buz bit his lip into his mouth, trying to imagine her grief and coming up short. He had grieved for a long time for a family he had never known. He couldn't imagine what it was to grieve for a family that had brought you up and held you and had then been taken away by war and by grief itself. He tried to imagine what it would be like if Tod never returned from Elbow Creek, if his parting words of Will do, Captain, had been the last thing Buz had ever heard from his mouth. That was the closest he could come in his mind to losing family.

'I guess – people never go when you expect them to,' he said quietly. 'There's always a breaking off point that comes before you wanted it to.'

'No, people never go when you expect them to,' Mallory echoed, closing her arms about her stomach and holding herself tightly. 'This is the least interval. That's what Bede said, isn't it? The sparrow flies in from the storm and flickers so quickly through the fire-lit hall, and then passes back to the storm outside. There must be an eternity on either side that we don't know about…'

'I don't know about Bede,' Buz said, shaking his head. 'I don't know about what comes before or after, either. It's here that's the important thing. Here. That sunlight coming through the window and the sound of birds outside and that – those apples in that basket on the counter. You can't make anything of what's before or after, Mally. You have to dig what's now. That's all.'

'Mally…' she repeated, as if that were all she had taken from his words. 'My mamma called me that. They called me Lolly in grade school, and they thought Mallory was so sophisticated in college that no one dared to shorten it. But my mamma called me Mally.'

'Do you mind?' Buz asked. 'I mean, Mallory seems a mouthful at times…'

She shook her head. 'Names are just names, after all. Some feel more special than others. I like if you call me that. It reminds me of her.'

'Is it all right if Tod and I sleep in the big room?' Buz asked, remembering how this conversation had started. 'Do you mind us staying for a while – just to see you're all right?'

'I don't mind,' she said. 'No, I don't mind. I like you. You seem like good boys.'

Buz smiled. It was trusting of her to accept the presence of two men in her house while she was alone, forty miles from the nearest town. He was just glad that it was he and Tod who had happened across her rather than someone with fewer scruples. But then, they had only come because they had followed the dog. Perhaps someone with fewer scruples would have just driven past that poor, bedraggled looking creature.

'Well, we do our best,' he said. 'We can help you fix this place up. Make it fit for habitation, you know. I don't see why you can't do spring cleaning in the fall, after all.'