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It was the boy that found us, the Preacher's son. I think he had been watching us for a long time. We were in the woods together, Lyall and I, and I saw Leonard in the bushes. I think I screamed when I saw him but when we went to find him he was already gone.
The Preacher was waiting for us at supper. We were refused food and told to go back to our houses while the others ate. When Frank returned that night he beat me and left me to sleep on the floor. Now Lyall and me are kept apart. The girl Muriel watches over him, while Leonard is like my shadow. Yesterday he threw a stone at me and drew blood from my head. He told me that was how the Bible said whores should be punished and that his father would deal with me the same way. The Cornishes saw what he did and Ethan Cornish struck him before he could throw a second stone. The boy pulled a knife on Ethan and cut his arm. The families have all argued for forgiveness for the sake of the community, but Lyall's wife will not look at me and one of his children spat on me when I passed her.
Last night there were voices raised in the Preacher's house. The families were putting their case to the Preacher but he was unmoved. There is bitterness among us now-at me and Lyall, but more at the Preacher and his ways. He has been asked to account for the money he holds in trust for us, but he has refused. I fear that Lyall and me will be forced from the community or that the Preacher will make us all leave and start again in another place. I have asked the Lord to forgive us our trespass against him and have prayed for help but part of me would not be sorry to leave if Lyall was beside me. But I ca
Ethan Cornish told me one more thing. He says that the Preacher's wife asked him to deal mercifully with us and he has refused to speak with her since. There is talk that he will scatter us to the four winds, where each family will make up for the sins of the community by spreading the word of God to new towns and cities. Tomorrow, the men, the women, and the children are to be divided into separate groups and each group will pray alone for guidance and forgiveness.
I have asked Ethan Cornish to place this note in the usual place and pray that you receive it in good health.
I am your sister,
Elizabeth
18
WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN YEARS OLD, my father took me on my first airplane trip. He got a good deal from a man he knew at American Airlines, a neighbor of ours whom my father had helped out when one of his sons got picked up for possession of some stolen radios. We flew from New York to Denver and from Denver to Billings, Montana, where we hired a car and spent a night in a motel before driving east early the following morning.
The sun shone on the hills, burnishing the green and beige with touches of silver before melting into the waters of the Little Bighorn River. We crossed the river at the Crow Agency and drove in silence to the entrance to the Little Bighorn Battlefield. It was Memorial Day and a platform had been erected at the cemetery, before which a small crowd occupied rows of lawn chairs while the few who could not find seats stood amid the gravestones and listened to the words of the service. Above them, the Stars and Stripes flapped in the morning breeze, but we did not stay to listen. Instead, fragments came to us as we climbed toward the monument, words like “youth,” “fallen,” “honor,” and “death” fading and then growing once again in volume, echoing across the shifting grass as if they were being spoken both in the present and in the distant past.
This was where Custer's five cavalry troops, young men mostly, were a
I looked out over the hills and thought that the Little Bighorn was a bleak place to die, surrounded by low hills of green and yellow and brown fading to blue and purple in the distance. From any patch of raised ground, you could see for miles. The men who died here would have known without question that no one was coming to rescue them, that these were their final moments on earth. They died terrible, lonely deaths far from home, their bodies subsequently mutilated and left to lie scattered on the battlefield for three days before finally receiving burial in a mass grave atop a small ridge in eastern Montana, their names carved on a granite monument above them.
In that place, I closed my eyes and imagined that I felt their ghosts crowding around me. I seemed to hear them: the horses neighing, the gunshots, the grass breaking beneath their feet.
And for an instant I was there with them, and I understood.
There are places where years have no meaning, where only a hair's breadth of history separates the present from the past. Standing there on that bleak hillside, a young man in a place where other young men had died, it was possible to feel a co
It was my first glimpse of the honeycomb world, my first inkling that the past never truly dies but is strangely, beautifully alive in the present. There is an interco
Now, as I headed north, I thought again of that day on the battlefield, a day of remembrance for the dead, my father standing silently beside me as the wind tousled our hair. This would be another pilgrimage, another acknowledgment of the debt owed by the living to the dead. Only by standing where the families had once stood, only by placing myself amid the memories of their final moments and listening for the echoes, could I hope to understand.
This is a honeycomb world. At St. Froid Lake, its interior lay exposed.
As I drove, I called in a long-standing favor. In New York, a woman's voice asked me my name, there was a pause, and I was put through to the office of Special Agent in Charge Hal Ross. Ross had recently been promoted and was now one of three SACs in the FBI's New York field office, operating under an assistant director. Ross and I had crossed swords the first time we met, but in the aftermath of the Traveling Man's death our relationship had gradually become more congenial. The FBI was now reviewing all cases with which the Traveling Man had been involved as part of its ongoing investigation into his crimes, and a room at Quantico had been devoted to relevant material from law enforcement agencies around the country. The investigation had been given the code name Charon, after the ferryman in Greek mythology who carried lost souls to Hades, and all references to the Traveling Man carried that name. It was a long process and one that was still far from complete. “It's Charlie Parker,” I said, when Ross came on the line.