The Nameless Method

Chapter 6: The Envelope

The pipe was still on the post of the pump.

His uncle's voice had gone out through the front door, and then the eating room had gone quiet — one table and then the next, and nothing starting it up again.

Hollis sat on the edge of the bed. Then he went as far as the kitchen door and stopped, because Bert had said not to leave the yard, and the kitchen door was the edge of it.

The kitchen was dark. The fire was banked and the pots were up on their hooks. Past the kitchen the eating room ran the whole length of the house, and past the eating room the street door was open on the evening.

So he could see the carriage.

It was small and black — body and wheels and top — and the lacquer was so good that the light out of the eating room lay along the whole side of it in one unbroken line.

Two horses, dun, matched to the shade, manes combed out and heads up, and not an ear moving on either of them.

Hollis knew horses. One of that pair had cost more than his father would earn in his life. The man had bought two.

There was a flag on the carriage. A small triangle of cloth on a short staff, set in the front corner of the body above where the driver sat: black ground, a red border running the whole way around it, and something in the middle worked in silver thread.

He studied it a long while and got nothing off it. The mark in the middle was not a shape he knew. It had been set there to be read from across the street, by somebody who already knew what it said.

A man at the table by the wall said one word to the man beside him. He said it low, low enough that it should not have carried the length of the room, and the man beside him took his hand off his glass and left the hand on the table.

Hollis knew the word. He had heard it out of Bert's mouth for two nights: the Order, the biggest thing in this part of the country and not close, the thing that takes care of its own.

He had heard the whole of it four or five times by now, sitting in there with a plate in front of him. He had never once seen it put a room's drinks down.

Then the carriage door opened and a man got down out of it.

He got down fast, one hand on the frame, and put no weight on the step. Forty or so, thin through the shoulders, quick.

Bert was out front to meet him. Hollis heard his uncle's voice and could not get the words out of it, and he heard the other man's answer, which had no words in it at all. Then the man was up the two steps and in through the street door.

He went through the eating room without looking at one table in it, and turned in at the kitchen, and Hollis got himself back out of the doorway and into the yard before the man reached it.

Bert followed him into the yard with his apron bunched in one hand and the other hand wiped twice on it.

The man crossed the yard and went to the door of the room Hollis had been sleeping in — and did that without asking anybody where the room was — and stopped there and looked in at the bed and the chair and the bag on the chair.

Then he turned around.

Bert had stopped to one side of him instead of in front of him.

"Mr. Ward," he said.

"Mm."

"You came out yourself," Bert said. "They told me—"

"Roads are bad." The man said it flat and quick, the way a man reads a weight off a scale. "Half of what we've got is out on them. The Elder sent me for the boy himself. Fewer hands in it. Less to go wrong."

Bert nodded.

The man looked at Hollis then, for the first time, and did not take long over it — up and down and done, the way you look at a horse when somebody has told you the age.

"This him?"

"My brother's boy," Bert said.

Hollis put his eyes on the middle of the man's coat and kept them there. He stood the way he did when his father was talking to somebody about him: still, and quiet, and with nothing in his hands.

Bert moved. He took a step and turned so that his back was to the house, and put his shoulder against the doorframe, and brought something out from inside his coat and passed it across the space between them.

It was paper. It went out of Bert's hand and into the man's hand, and Hollis watched the whole of it from four feet away, because nothing else in the yard was doing anything, and nobody had told him to look somewhere else.

The man did not look down at it. He ran his thumb under the flap and opened it, and folded it once the short way, and laid it flat in his palm and pressed down on it with his other hand, the way Bert weighed a coin in the flat of his hand.

Hollis did not know what it was. He knew it had gone from his uncle to the man, and he knew his uncle's back had been turned to the house while it went.

The man's shoulders came down. Not much — about as much as a man's shoulders come down when he has stopped holding on to a question.

"Then we're square," he said.

Bert did not answer that. His hands stayed in the apron.

"He's never been off the mountain," Bert said. "If you could—"

"He'll be looked after on the road."

Bert shut his mouth.

"Time's short," the man said. "Get him and let's go."

He went back through the kitchen. Bert tipped his head at the room behind him, and Hollis went in and got the bag — the leather one, on the chair where he had left it — and carried it back out.

Ward was already out through the eating room by then. Hollis followed him down the length of the house with his uncle behind him, and the men at the tables watched the three of them go by the way men watch weather come up the valley.

The carriage had a driver up on the box. Ward got in and did not pull the door shut after him, and after a second Hollis worked out that the open door was for him.

He looked at Bert once, and Bert looked back at him.

Hollis got up on the step and in and sat down with the bag on his knees. Bert had walked him as far as the open door and put a hand on the frame. Then he took the hand off and stepped back into the road.

The driver moved the horses and the carriage rolled, and Hollis turned around on the seat and looked out the back.

Bert was in the middle of the road in front of the Spring House with the apron bunched in one hand, in the long yellow light from the front windows that lay flat across the dirt. He raised his other hand.

He said something.

Hollis could not hear it — not over the wheels on the packed dirt, not over the shod horses. He watched his uncle's mouth move and the hand stay up, and then the light slid off him and there was only the window, and then the street bent, and the window was a small yellow square, and then it was gone.

Hollis turned back to the front and put the bag down on the seat beside him, and the horses took the road up out of Oxbow at a trot.