of a somewhat owlish cast, and a generally pleasant demeanor highlighted by a ready smile. She wore a grey dress and white vest and a white bandana covering her bun. The bun made of her graying hair, that is. Faith’s Mother’s cousin’s sister and so an Aunt of the third order or declension or degree.
“Why didn’t it take me?” Faith said after a time, Aunt May still at her side, still touching Faith’s hand and still gently caressing Faith’s hair.
“My child, you couldn’t have ….” May began.
She stopped.
“You mustn’t blame yourself,” she added.
“Why didn’t we stay?” Faith interjected. “How did I lose sight of him?”
“There, there dear,” Aunt May said softly. “It does no good to ….”
A. Jacks leaned back in a corner of the stall opposite the huddled women.
“Matter can neither be created nor destroyed,” he said in a tone boasting just the slightest tinge of some annoyance, or rather mumbled under his breath just loudly enough to be heard. Heard by Faith, at least. Aged nearly seventy or thereabouts Aunt May wasn’t necessarily tuned in to such rumbling frequencies.
Faith watched A. Jacks stand and stretch.
Aunt May eventually hugged Faith and stroked her hair while gently whispering the strictly necessary things that seemingly must be said under such circumstances, but in a practiced, loving, confidently textured way that made the conventional words and phrases somewhat less stunningly empty and glaring. A thankless task, that. Only so much one can say. Easy to get it wrong, God knows.
“Don’t you go listening to them and all their crazy notions,” she, Aunt May, eventually whispered or cooed between reiterating again the necessity of surrender to a higher power, referencing once more those commandments touching upon submission to the living and the doing of that which must be done, for those who remain, even after a loved one has been rudely taken, or seized, or, as in this case, plucked from existence. Faith felt herself being strangely comforted even as the conventional phrases washed over her for perhaps the fifth or fiftieth time.
A. Jacks for his part pored over blueprints arrayed in a corner of the barn stall.
“Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe,” he mumbled while revising slightly the plans for the mud room to be appended to the kitchen, handily.
CHAPTER FIVE
The men took to the fields the next day intent on cornering and killing the cougar, the hunting company discouraged not in the least by the previous day’s failure, for they were patient men, and proud, and diligent and industrious, and had nothing better to do anyway.
Cousin Jeb led a covey of hunters across the dew-drenched farmyard through a grove of stunted pines across the pasture south of the neighbor’s place, thence up a slight incline to the eighty-acre patch of freshly sewn oats he knew the deer loved to plunder.
Too damn many deer. There’s your trouble.
They crested a ridge south of the bend of the river nearest the old railroad trestle, rifles in hand, sweating and swearing and scouring fruitlessly, which is just about when the sound of gunfire could be heard directly to the east and south.
The head of each man jack swiveled as if sharing a string.
Not a muscle moved.
A second shot, unmistakably,
“Come from right over there,” Jeb said, pointing.
“Musta cornered it, or somethin’,” another of the company said.
“Let’s go have a looksee.”
The motion carried.
Moving somewhat more quickly than before the heavily armed men found their way across the road, then through the dense scrub bordering the river to the several men crouched in an attitude of examining the distinctive paw marks decorating a sandy bar.
Big cat tracks, no mistake. Chester had found or rather stumbled across them. He fired one shot into the air, then another, by way of summoning the company. It sufficed. Soon enough all dozen or dozen-and-a-half men still numbered among the searchers were haunched on the side of the sandy bar, expertly examining the tracks. Never mind that not one among the company had ever seen a big cat track before in their respective lives. One look and they just knew. As if predator paw marks are ingrained in genetic memory, or something.
They followed the tracks through the scrub and brush of the sandy river bank, on hands and knees when necessary, the men fanning out at roughly six-pace intervals so as not to lose the winding thread. Where the river’s swirling currents had impregnated the sandy soil with ample water the cat’s four feet left a relatively clear set of paw prints for the hunters to follow. Where the soil lay still and dry the prints declined to a mere whisper.
Nor did the meandering creature offer up a linear line for easy tracking, as it turns out. More like a bobbing, weaving, randomly jittery movement that was not movement so much as a wave washing its many fingered -- or in this case toed -- way. Almost as if the cat took more than one path in its stalking of whatsoever deer or weasel or mere boy it stalked. An eerie proposition at which the hunters might collectively have scoffed had they not known what they knew of cats and their mysterious Satan-endowed inscrutability.
Arch at that hour grimaced abed in the farmhouse from which the company earlier had disembarked. The Agency Man seated at the side of his bed, of course. Still sporting the midnight-blue suit and black tie and concealing shades. Arch for his part clad in the t-shirt and boxers that passed for comfortable jammies.
“All in a day’s work,” the Agency Man said while idly filing his nails. “You yokel types slay me, I must say. All flim, flam and fandango.”
He chortled slightly at the alliterative witticism.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Arch inquired with some slight irritation.
“A paradigmatic preconception,” the Agency Man interjected lightly. “Did you know the Babylonian ziggurat had seven stories, while both the menorah and the tree of life have seven branches? Seven deadly sins, seven wonders of the world, seven year itch. Funny how connections get made in the old brain box. Obama and Osama. Fliver McGee and Tug McGraw. Ho Chi Minh and Jimmy Hoffa. Speaking of souls missing and presumed ….”
“You aren’t making any sense,” Arch interrupted somewhat grimly.
“Oh, but I am,” the Agency Man, whose name was Hanratty, replied coolly. He stood and strode to the window where he surveyed the surrounding fields somewhat pensively. “I notice you aren’t tramping the moors today. Got a hitch in your gitalong?”
“I am legitimately injured,” Arch replied starchly.
“Uh-huh,” Hanratty replied, bending over a folding chair while kicking his leg in an impromptu display of his own relative suppleness. “Who among us hasn’t sustained the odd tweak? Too bad you’re not bathed in impregnability, or something. I gotta say, though, I’m getting a little worried about you.”
“You don’t say,” Arch replied drily.
“See, the thing is, the universe is about seventy-five percent hydrogen, while you yourself are about sixty-three percent hydrogen, except -- and here’s the kicker -- about ninety-six percent of everything is dark, in the sense of undetectable. Meaning most of everything is nothing. You catch my drift?”
Kicking high to visually augment the lecture, Hanratty cast Arch an apparently sincere concerned glance.
A concerned, apparently, sincere glance.
Arch groaned.
“I don’t see how that pertains ….” he began.
“Then again, it’s amazing the extent to which the mind can talk itself into things,”