The Long Home (24 page)

Time passed and he began to feel that Winer wasn’t coming back. At last he began to think him dead. He knew that the world was wide in its turning and it was fraught with dark alleyways and pastoral footpaths down which peril lurked with a patience rivaling that of the very old.

I never needed nobody anyway, he told himself. Nary one of them, then or now, and at last he was touched with a cold and solitary peace.

For he had the white road baking hot in the noonday sun, the wavering blue treeline, the fierce, sudden violence of summer storms. At night the moon tracked its accustomed course and the timeless whippoorwills tolled from the dark and they might have been the selfsame whippoorwills that called to him in his youth.

That’s all that matters, he told himself with a spare and bitter comfort. Those were the things that time did not take away from you. They were the only things that lasted.