6

For some days Milburn stood as still as Humphrey Stalladge's card game after his wife had uttered a word which seemed obscene to both of them: gravediggers and graves were a taboo subject, when everybody in town knew well or was related to one of the sheet-covered bodies in the jail. People settled down in front of the television and ate pizzas from the freezer and prayed that the power lines would stay up; they avoided one another. If you looked outside and saw your next-door neighbor fighting up his lawn to get to his front door, he looked unearthly, transformed by stress into a wild ragged frontier version of himself: you knew he'd damage anyone who threatened to touch his dwindling store of food. He'd been touched by that savage music you had tried to escape, and if he looked through your Thermopane picture window and saw you his eyes were barely human.

And if good old Sam (assistant manager down at Horn's Tire Recapping Service and a shark at poker) or good old Ace (retired foreman from a shoe factory in Endicott and a terrible bore, but sent his son through medical school) were not outside, catching your eye with a starved glance which meant take your eyes off me, you bastard, then it was even worse: because what you saw looked not murderous but dead. The streets impassable except on foot, nine-foot, twelve-foot drifts, a constant swirl of white in the air, a glooming sky. The houses on Haven Lane and Melrose Avenue looked vacant, drapes drawn against the desolation outside. In town, snow drifted up to the roofs and sheeted across the streets; windows reflected chill emptiness. Milburn looked as though everyone in town were lying still under a sheet in one of Hardesty's cells; and when someone like Clark Mulligan or Rollo Draeger, who had lived all his life in Milburn, looked at it now a cold whisper of wind brushed across his heart.

That was in the daytime. Between Christmas and New Year's Day, ordinary people in Milburn, those who had never heard of Eva Galli or Stringer Dedham and thought of the Chowder Society (if they thought of it at all) as a collection of museum pieces, wound up going to bed earlier and earlier-at ten, then at nine-thirty-because the thought of all that black weather out there made them want to close their eyes and not open them again until dawn. If the days were threatening, the nights were ferocious. The wind tore around the corners of the houses, rattling shutters and storm windows, and two or three times a night a big gust flattened itself against the wall like an enormous wave-hard enough to make the lights sway. And it often seemed to ordinary people in Milburn that mixed up with all that banging and hissing outside were voices-voices that couldn't contain their glee. The Pegram boys heard something tapping at their bedroom window, and in the morning saw the prints of bare feet outside on a drift. Grieving Walter Barnes was not the only person in Milburn who thought the whole town was going crazy.

On the last day of the year the mayor finally got through to all three of the deputies and told them that they had to get Hardesty out of the office and into a hospital-the mayor was afraid that looting would begin soon if they couldn't get the streets plowed. He appointed Leon Churchill acting sheriff-the biggest and dumbest of the deputies, the one most likely to follow orders-and told Leon that if he didn't patch up Omar Norris's plow himself and start clearing the streets, he'd be out of a job permanently. So on New Year's Day Leon walked to the municipal garage and found that the plow wasn't as bad as it had looked. Sears James's big car had bent some of the plates, but everything still worked. He took the plow out that morning, and in the first hour developed more respect for Omar Norris than he'd ever had for the mayor.

But when the deputies got to the sheriff's office all they found was an empty room and a smelly cot. Walt Hardesty had disappeared sometime during the previous four days. He had left behind six empty bourbon bottles but no note or forwarding address-certainly nothing to tell of the gut-panic he'd felt one night when he lifted his head from his desk to pour himself another drink and heard more noises from back in the utility cells. At first it had sounded to Hardesty like conversation, and then like the sound a butcher makes when he slaps raw steak on the counter. He hadn't waited for whoever it was back there to start coming down the corridor, but had put on his hat and his jacket and slipped out into the blizzard. He made it as far as the high school before a hand closed over his elbow and a calm voice said in his ear, "Isn't it time we met, sheriff?" When Leon's plow uncovered him, Walt Hardesty looked like a piece of carved ivory: a life-size ivory statue of a ninety-year-old man.