The View from Castle Rock

behind us we were in what was at first pitch-black darkness. All around us, almost choking us, the smell of that summer’s new hay. Russell led me by the hand just as confidently as if he could see. His hand was hotter than mine.
    After a moment I could see something myself. Bales of hay set one on top of another like giant bricks. We were in some sort of loft, overlooking the stable. Now I could get a strong smell of horses, as well as of hay, and hear continual shuffling and munching and gentle bumping around in the stalls. Most horses would be out in the pasture all night at this time of year, but these were probably too valuable to be left outside in the dark.
    Russell put my hand on the rung of a ladder, by which we could climb to the top of the hay bales.
    “Want me to go first or after?” he whispered.
    Why whisper? Would we disturb the horses? Or does it just always seem natural to whisper in the dark? Or when you have gone weak in the legs but aching, determined, in another part of your body.
    Something happened then. I thought for a moment that it was an explosion. Lightning hitting. Or even an earthquake. It seemed to me that the whole barn shook as it filled with light. Of course I had never been anywhere near an explosion or within a mile of a place where lightning struck, never felt one tremor of an earthquake. I had heard guns going off but always out of doors and at some distance. I had never heard the blast of a shotgun indoors under a high roof.
    That was what I had heard now. Miriam McAlpin had shot her gun off, shot it up into the mow, then at once turned on all the barn lights. The horses had gone wild, whinnying and tossing themselves about and kicking the sides of their stalls, but you could still hear Miriam yelling.
    “I know you’re there. I know you’re there.”
    “Go home,” Russell was hissing into my ear. He spun me around towards the door.
    “Go on home,” he said angrily, or at least with an urgency like anger. As if I’d been a dog following him, or one of his little sisters, who had no right to be here.
    Perhaps he said that too in a whisper, perhaps not. With the noise that the horses and Miriam made together, it wouldn’t have mattered. He gave me one strong and untender push, then turned towards the stable and hollered, “Don’t shoot, it’s me… Hey Miriam. It’s me.”
    “I know you’re there-”

    “It’s me. It’s Russ.” He had run to the front of the haymow.
    “Who’s up there? Russ? Is that you?
Russ?
”
    There must have been a ladder going down to the stable. I heard Russell’s voice descending. He sounded bold but shaky, as if he was not quite sure that Miriam would not start shooting again.
    “It’s just me. I come in the top way.”
    “I heard somebody,” said Miriam disbelievingly.
    “I know. It was me. I just come in to see Lou. How her leg was.”
    “It was you? ”
    “Yeah. I told you.”
    “You were up in the mow.”
    “I come in by the top door.”
    He sounded more in control now. He was able to ask a question of his own.
    “How long you been in here?”
    “I just came in now. I was in the house and suddenly it hit me, there’s something wrong at the barn.”
    “What’d you fire off the gun for? You could’ve killed me.”
    “If anybody was in here I wanted to give them a scare.”
    “You could’ve waited. You could’ve yelled first. You could’ve killed me.”
    “It never crossed my mind it was you.”
    Then Miriam McAlpin cried out again, as if she’d just spotted a new intruder.
    “I could’ve killed you. Oh, Russ. I never thought. I could’ve shot you.”
    “Okay. Calm down,” Russell said. “You could’ve but you didn’t.”
    “You could be shot now and I’d be the one that did it.”
    “You didn’t.”

    “What if I had, though? Jesus. Jesus. What if I had?”
    She was weeping and saying something like this over and over, but in a muffled voice, as if something was stuffed into her mouth.
    Or as if she was being held, pressed against something, somebody, that could comfort and quiet her.
    Russell’s voice, swelling with mastery, soothing.
    “Okay. Yeah. So okay, honey. Okay.”
    That was the last thing I heard. What a strange word to speak to Miriam McAlpin.
Honey.
The word he’d used to me, during our bouts of kissing. Commonplace enough, but then it had seemed something I could suck up, a sweet mouthful like the stuff itself. Why would he say it now, when I wasn’t anywhere near him? And in