Book 1 - The Silver spike Read Online Free Page B

soil pot
you ain’t got time to empty yourself. When was the last time
you bothered to change your clothes? When was the last time you had
a bath?”
    He cussed me in a cracked-voice scream.
    “You’re just about the most selfish, thoughtless
bastard I ever seen. Won’t even clean up after
yourself.”
    I went on like that, louder and angrier. But he never really
fought back, which made me think maybe he was about as disgusted
with himself as I was with him. But who can go around admitting
he’s a hopeless, useless hunk of shit?
    Finally he ran out of what little fight he had. He got up and
staggered out, without any parting shot. He did not burn any
bridges behind him.
    A guy I worked with and I talked it over about what you do with
drunks. His dad was a reformed drunk. He told me you got to stop
trying to help them out. You got to stop making excuses for them
and not take excuses from them. You got to put them on a spot where
they can’t do nothing but face the truth because they
aren’t going to change a bit till they decide to do it. They
got to be the ones who believe they’ve turned into dregs and
something has got to be changed.
    I didn’t know if I could wait around long enough for Raven
to decide he was a real grown-up man and he was going to have to
face reality. Darling was gone and that was that. There were kids
to be found. That whole past, down in Opal, had to be hooked back
out into the light and made peace with.
    Actually, I was pretty sure he would come around, given time.
The kind of guy he was being was the kind he held in deep contempt.
That had to seep through. But it sure was frustrating, waiting him
out.
    He came back home four days later, sobered up and cleaned up and
looking halfway like the Raven I remembered. He was all apologetic.
He promised to get straight and to do better.
    Sure. They do that, too.
    I would believe it when I saw it.
    I didn’t make any big deal out of anything. I didn’t
preach. There wasn’t no profit in that.
    He hung on pretty good. He looked like he was getting somewhere.
But then two days later I came home and found him so stinking he
couldn’t crawl.
    Hell with him, I said.
     
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VII
    They were running shorthanded, what with Timmy laid up after
getting caught in a blast of the tree’s blue light, but Smeds
did not see where it made any difference. They were not getting
anywhere. They could not go out there in the daytime without being
seen from the town. After dark that monster always came and dug in
its hole. They could not go out there then. And for a long time
after it chased the monster, the tree remained alert, laying for
more intruders. Timmy had found that out the hard way.
    It looked like there was maybe an hour each morning, just before
dawn, when it might be possible to get something accomplished
safely.
    But what? Nobody had figured that out. They sure weren’t
going to get a chance to chop the sucker down. Ringing it
wasn’t worth squat, even if you could get close enough for
long enough to do it. How long for a ringed tree to die? Especially
this kind?
    Somebody suggested poisoning it. That sounded so good that they
talked it over, recalling things they had seen used to kill weeds
and stuff. Only the method demanded that they have a poison. Which
meant going back to Oar to buy it. With money they did not have.
And it might take as long as ringing the son of a bitch. Time was
not an ally. Tully was in a panic about time already. He thought it
a miracle no competition had yet shown.
    “We got to do it fast.”
    Timmy said, “We ain’t going to get it done as long
as that monster keeps coming around.”
    “So maybe we help him find what he wants.”
    “You better got a mouse in your pocket when you say
‘we,’ cousin,” Smeds said. “Because I
ain’t going out there to help that thing do squat.”
    “We burn it,” Fish said.
    “Huh? What?”
    “The tree, fool. We burn it down.”
    “But we can’t go out