youth, day, old age and night

Rustin Cohle is fifteen years old and he knows the signs of a homestead on the rocks – he’s never spoken to the family that live over the ridge, hasn’t so much as hiked past in months, but the familiar sights of habitation have cut out. There’s no more anonymous all-is-well chirps on the radio band, that went away first, and there’s no sawblade thrum of a generator to be heard; for a few days there was an unusual amount of black-oil smoke pouring down over the ridge every time the wind changed, and now there’s nothing, only the interrupted fall of hard-crust snow. It’s the wrong season for that, but life’s full of surprises.

Travis has gone to town without him, and maybe by the time Rust returns he’ll be back again too.

Rust goes up the hill with one of the dogs one day, and a bow strapped to his back. By the time he clears the trees and the homestead is in sight, he knows: something bad happened here. The trees are still, the clearing is quiet. Hope isn’t an especially developed faculty for Rust, not even at fifteen, but he hopes: they gave up and quit, they went back to wherever they came from, to Maine or Massachusetts. The husband left and the wife stayed behind, but she couldn’t handle the generator, and needs help. The man fell off the roof or struck off a hand with a saw and they took an airlift or a Snowcat ride out of there when they could get it. In the night, maybe, though Travis is a light sleeper and the sound of aircraft sweeping in would have woken him for certain. There were four children, and more on the way last time Rust heard of it. He envisions non-fatal accidents to explain it, domestic mutinies, mostly harmless.

Rust doesn’t know what neighbors say to each other. His father always made him hang back in the house when strangers came by, except when absolutely necessary, and all the things he would have wanted to say have fled from his mind. People come here to taste freedom, to dodge the government, and to be alone. No one asks questions.

No one in sight, tire-tracks new enough to still stand out in the patchy grass but half-filled-in with meltwater. No vehicle to be found, despite an obvious place to keep one. It’s a tidy homestead, ruined now. Rustin doesn’t know why they came here. For the multitude of reasons men bring their wives to the wilderness – selfishness, loneliness, absolute control. There’s a rabbit hutch on the edge of the yard, with the cages all smashed flat and the heater kicked over, leaking acrid oil.

Rust tracks along the periphery, marking out the boundary. The dog tramps along after him with heavy neat steps. There’s a pen for larger livestock, maybe sheep and maybe goats, but the gate’s been shattered off its hinges. The animals are nowhere to be found, though their tracks still crisscross the ground.

The dog barks once, in no particular direction.

More outbuildings than Rust would have chosen, all built for milder conditions, all in disrepair. The roof of the barn has been stoven in on one side by a fallen tree; the rest is slowly collapsing. The remains of a generator has been dragged out into the open, in a halo of scattered equipment and tools – spooled wire, wrenches, fuses, none of it any good. Somebody’s laid the insides open to the air, with the blunt side of an ax-head, maybe. The hair on the back of Rust’s neck is prickling.

There’s blood in the grass. In front of the doorway to the house is a black patch of frosted-over blood.

The old man’s over by the woodpile, with his back against the cut wood, arms and legs splayed like a star; his wife is next to him, laid up like a rag doll in a long smudge that rounds the corner: drag marks. Rust prods them; both bodies are stiffening where they lie, but not frozen to the ground.

Rustin approaches the front door edgewise, shouldering up to the cracked window. In the house at a folding table there’s a naked girl with blackened feet peeling an apple. Rust’s bow is in his hand.

The dog barks again, once.

“Come out,” Rustin says, watching her startle. “Come out or I’ll come in to get you. You hurt?”

She’s maybe thirteen or a starved sixteen, small and shrunken with dirty white hair. Empty plates, empty buckets massed beside the door. Stove’s out, no lamps, furnishings haphazardly chosen and worn thin.

He’s already shouldering out of his jacket to cover the girl when he sees it – the coal-smudge figure of a man in the corner of the room, a man in a black coat, tall enough to brush the sunken ceiling. Rust squares himself to fire without thinking, with the jacket hanging from his shoulder – but there’s nothing there in the clear white noonday light, just a dirty narrow pane half-covered by tarp and a scorchmark floor to ceiling. Rust kicks open the door, and steps inside.