Chapter 6
Gillie…
Boone pulled the brim of the old work hat low over his eyes and came into Fox Hollow on foot, by the cut behind the McAfee acre, a mile and a half of creek-bottom where the road ran three times that length, the same route he had taken home last night and sworn he would never take again.
He hadn't stayed on the porch. He had given Mr. Barclay his word that he would and then he had broken it an hour after the buggy rolled out toward the station, because every minute Gillie Fairchild thought he hadn't come last night was a minute he couldn't get back.
He'd explain it to Mr. Barclay afterward and take whatever was waiting.
He would not be the man at the back door who couldn't look him in the face, but he wouldn't be the boy under the willow who hadn't shown up, either.
He crossed the alley behind the laundress's, the same alley as before, and he hated it.
Keeping the hat down, he counted his breaths.
The town in daylight was a thinner danger than the town at midnight, in some ways, because in daylight at least a boy could pretend to be on an errand, but in other ways it was worse because in daylight every face was a face that had read the news.
He turned at the church.
She was there.
Gillie was halfway up the boardwalk on the far side, in a pale dress with a basket on her arm, walking out of the milliner's.
He did not say her name, just took a step toward her.
She lifted her head and saw him, and her eyes went the size of saucers.
She stopped in the middle of the boardwalk.
The basket on her arm went still. For one half of one breath he thought she might cross to him.
She did not.
She turned. She turned so quickly that the brim of her bonnet caught the sun. She walked, fast, the wrong way down the boards. She did not look back. The basket bumped against her thigh.
Boone stood where he was. The air in his throat went into a dry knot.
He had imagined this conversation the whole way in. He had seen her face, her listening, her saying You came back. I told my father nothing. He had seen her hands. The one image he hadn't pictured was her walking away.
He had cost her already. The news had probably reached her house before he had.
Her father would have said her name in a certain voice.
She would have heard it. The boy she had agreed to walk with had become, in a Fox Hollow night, the boy whose name was being shouted across porches, and he guessed she hadn't yet found out how to hold both of those in one heart.
A door opened to his left.
He did not see who opened it. The eyes hit him first. Then a voice.
"That's him."
Boone moved.
He did not turn his head. He went down off the boardwalk and across the road at an angle and around the corner of the feed store. A second voice picked up the first. A third. He ran for the road home.
The boardwalk thinned. The houses thinned.
The town went out into the brushy land where the buggies went home, and he stayed off the road and parallel to it, working his way through the willow thickets along the creek.
Horses sounded on the road behind him. He laid flat, and waited until they passed.
They were not after him; they were going about their afternoon.
He couldn't tell himself that for sure, and his shoulders didn't believe it either.
He stayed in the willows and he thought about Gillie.
She hadn't given him away. That was what mattered.
She had turned and walked away from him in public, with a basket on her arm and the milliner's behind her, no word and no sign.
That was the gift. She would have had every reason to step forward, point at him, say his name aloud, and clear her own house of any rumor it might have been close enough to.
Instead she walked the other way. She let him stand in the street as a single guilty figure and took nothing of his trouble onto herself.
He could break this by saying her name. He could go to Mr. Barclay's kitchen tonight and put his hands flat on the table and say, I was meeting a girl, sir.
She lives in town with her father. We were going to walk by the creek.
I heard the shots. I ran. I haven't stolen anything.
The whole of the picture would change. Mr. Barclay would believe him, and the sheriff might believe him.
But…
Her father would know.
Her father would know, and the town would know, and a girl who had agreed to a walk would never walk through Fox Hollow again without a name pinned to the back of her dress. That was a name a girl didn't outlive.
Boone pressed his face into the crook of his elbow against the willow trunk.
His throat went tight. The bark pressed into his cheek and smelled of green dampness.
His breath came ragged against the wool of his sleeve.
He stayed there. He counted ten breaths in and ten breaths out, the way Mr. Barclay had taught him to do, the same way he had counted them the night of the shots.
He could not say her name. He had known it on the platform side of the willow that other night. He knew it again now. He would carry whatever came. He would not give a sixteen-year-old girl to the dogs in his place.
He went on toward the ranch through the willows, low, slow, keeping the creek at his right shoulder.
He had broken his word to Mr. Barclay, he hadn't got to speak to Gillie, and he had been seen by another half dozen people.
The only thing he'd won in town today was the knowledge that she hadn't given him up either.
It would have to be enough. But the voice that had named him wasn't the sheriff's voice, and he didn't know whose it was.
The buggy would be back by now. Mr. Barclay had gone to the station for the woman he was to marry, and Boone had promised to be on the porch when they came up the road, and he had broken that too.
He thought, briefly and without meaning to, about the woman who had come a long way and was about to walk into a house that had a stolen box and a running boy attached to it before she had set down her trunk.