Renée was sitting on the tailgate of her new used truck behind them, a twelve-year-old Silverado with four good tires, wrapped in a blanket and drinking coffee from a thermos. She worked days now in the cafeteria at the hospital in Coudersport, where they had a two-bedroom apartment over a hardware store on Main Street that nobody named Shuler owned. Ferris came to dinner on Sundays and complained about the food. Bev Kostelnik sent a postcard from every state she hauled through, and Toby had thirty-one of them taped above his bed.
Shuler Water & Haul was gone. Its trucks sat in a fenced lot outside Galeton with state seizure notices on the windshields. The attorney general's office had brought charges against Garrett Shuler in March, a long list of them, and a grand jury in Potter County had indicted his son for the murder of Jesse Kline. Dale Rusk had pleaded guilty to his part and was going to testify. The bore on Kettle Creek Road had been capped with eleven feet of concrete, and the wells at the trailer park were being tested every month, and Ferris said the creek was running clearer already, though Hollis suspected Ferris was saying that mostly for Toby.
In January, before the surgery, Hollis had ridden to Erie in the cold. He had walked into the state police barracks on the east side of town in his old vest and sat in a room for six hours with two detectives and a tape recorder and told them everything. In February, on a gray afternoon, they had found Lonnie Pruitt in the bottom of an old gravel pit off Route 97, near Waterford, right where Ray Rusk had said he would be. The district attorney had not decided yet what to do about Hollis Teague. His lawyer said it could go either way. Hollis had told the lawyer that was fine, that he'd take whatever came, and found to his surprise that he meant it.
In April he had met Michael Pruitt. They sat at a picnic table in a park by the bayfront, two men who had looked at each other through a window thirty-two years ago. Michael was forty-one now, a high school shop teacher, with two daughters and his father's eyes. Hollis had told him he was sorry. He did not ask to be forgiven, and Michael did not offer it, and Hollis thought that was right. But at the end, when Hollis got up to go, Michael had said, "I remember the car. I always wondered if you saw me."
"I saw you," Hollis said. "I've seen you every day."
Michael had nodded slowly. "Thank you for coming yourself," he said. "Instead of a letter." That was all. It was more than enough.
Now, on the mountain, Toby lay back in the grass with his hands behind his head.
"Hollis?"
"Yeah."
"When you were outside. Before everybody came. Were you scared?"
Hollis thought about the gun, and the dime-sized hole, and the door at his back.
"Yes," he said. "But I wasn't sitting in the car."
The boy seemed to understand that. He didn't say anything more. He just reached over in the dark, without looking, and found Hollis's hand, and held it, and the two of them lay there in the cold grass on top of God's Country and looked up at the seven sisters, and the old man, for the first time in his life, tried very hard to see the seventh.