Outer Dark Read Online Free

the door and looked at her. She turned her head away slowly.
    It was midmorning when he set out and it took him just a little over an hour to reach the store at the junction, the sun warm on his back and the fine pumice of the road already paling and going to dust again. A horsefly followed behind his head as if towed there on a string.
    When he got to the store it was closed. He rattled the latch and peered inside. From an upper window a voice called down: We still christians here. You’ll have to come back a weekday. He turned away. By noon he was at the cabin again, sitting on a stump in the glade and carving at it intently with his knife. When he went in she was asleep in her foul bed. He sat before the fireplace watching ashes rise and wheel feebly in the cold light that fell there. She stirred heavily in her sleep, moaning. He watched her. When he could stay no longer he went out again and walked on the road. He could not decide what to do. He sat on a stone by the side of the road and with a dead stick drew outlandish symbols in the dust.
       They made their meal that night on the last stale pieces of cornbread, a fine mold like powdered jade beginning on them where they lay dried and curling in the cupboard. She did not even ask him about the store. After she was asleep he again appropriated the quilt from off the bed and spread it upon the floor. He removed his shoes and lay down and folded the quilt over himself and stared at what shadows the joists and beams made upon the roof’s underside. The lamp guttered and ceased. His eyes were closed. Before he slept he saw again the birth-stunned face, the swamp trees in a dark bower above the pale and naked flesh and the black blood seeping from the navel.
    He woke early, the hard boarding laminated against his spine. A smoky light crept on the one pane of glass. He rose and refolded the quilt, replaced it at the foot of the bed and got his shoes and put them on, watching her, finally leaning above her wasted face to hear her breath. He took a drink of water from the bucket and opened the door on this new day, leaning in the doorframe, drinking. He shook the last of the water from the dipper and stretched, one hand to the small of his back.
    Before it was full daylight he had gone to the spring again, the empty pail jiggling against his thigh, against pathside briers with a tin squeal, kneeling finally and watching the water suck cold and sandy over the bucket rim, filling and setting it on the bank and laving water on his wrists and forearms, dipping two palmfuls against his forehead, leaning his mouth into the meniscal calm of it, wide and tilting in the water the eyes that watched his eyes.
       He set the bucket on the table and took up the weightless dipper and floated it on top. She was watching him.
    I’d admire to have me a drink of that there fresh springwater, she said.
    He brought it to her, watched her drink.
    You want more? he said.
    She held up the empty dipper. If they is some, she said.
    They’s a bucketful if you want it.
    She sat with her hands clasped between her breast and her belly while he brought the dipper to her again. Light from the window lay in a niggardly stain across the bed.
    If that old winder was warshed, she said, I bet you could see out ever which way.
    Funny to me you never noticed it when you was up and able.
    I could get out my own self then, she said. Stead of havin to lay up and look out a winder.
    He took the empty dipper from her and crossed the room.
    I ain’t warshin no winders, he said.
    Well.
    Well what?
    Nothin. I just said well.
    You better just.
    I thought I heard that old tinker back this mornin, she said. Messin around.
    He had been looking through the cupboard and now he stopped and closed the doors and looked at her. She was staring vacantly out toward the pines. That old tinker, he said, is long gone.
    She looked at him. I just wondered, she said. I heard some kind of commotion sounded like him.
    Well it