In the Night Season by Richard Bausch Page A

wanting to run, get out and disappear into the darkness. The drawer next to the sink was filled with knives, and he picked one, setting the screwdriver down. He stepped to the back door, breathed a moment, tightly gripped the knife, and moved the bordering curtain aside.
    Travis was standing there with his back to the door, looking off toward the field.
    The boy ducked back below the level of the window and saw the knob on the door begin to move. It turned one way and caught, then turned the other. The boy backed along the base of the wall, under the table and down a small stairwell, where a plywood door opened onto a dark, earth-smelling basement. He crouched against the door, trying not to scream, the scream rising under his heart. Somewhere and at some point he had dropped the knife. There was no thinking now—only the reaction, cringing against the thin plywood in that dim little cavelike enclosure and watching the pane break in the back door.
    The big hand reached in and opened the door. And there was Travis, looking cool and calm and perfectly unemotional. He went on, into the living room, to the hallway and the stairs up. “Bags?” he said. “Goddammit. Bags.”
    The heavy, booted feet were just above Jason, creaking in the beams of the stairwell. He stepped up into the kitchen and out the open door, across the wooden stoop and down into the soft ground, where he fell. He was lying in the pool of light, and he rolled out of it, into the freezing, dead grass near the cellar window. There, in the dark, he came to his feet and hurled himself close to the house, toward the truck, then under the truck, and on, out into the gravel road, running.

AT MERCY
    N ORA S PENCER M ICHAELSON SAT in a meeting of other instructors of Sisters of Mercy School, trying to be calm about the fact that there were no answers to her calls home. She reminded herself of other evenings she hadn’t been able to get through—Edward sometimes took Jason to the store, or out in the woods to mock hunt deer. It was not unusual for him to do something to keep the boy busy. Only last week there had been no answer, and she came home to find them stacking firewood that Mr. Bishop had bought; she had called four times that evening.
    When she could hold this fact in her mind, she could breathe.
    But she kept feeling the clammy sense of violation over what had been in her mailbox two afternoons ago. It sent her spiraling toward panic. She clasped her hands in front of her, like a student, and tried to pay attention, tried not to think at all. If she could only attend to things, she might be able to speed the meeting to a close. This, she knew, was a hopeless fantasy. The meeting would drag on.
     
    Lately it had come back to her, with a force, that she had quit teaching all those years ago for reasons more basic than her marriage to Jack Michaelson. Something about the life had exhausted her andmade her feel obscurely angry a lot of the time. It was an element of her makeup, a severity that the inadequacies of her students seemed continually to aggravate. She suspected finally that she lacked the necessary patience, except that wasn’t quite it, either; with students who were interested and working hard, she was more than forbearing; she suffered them almost to the point of indulgence. But so many of the students she encountered had already been ruined by other teachers, or by the culture they lived in, which seemed to value everything else over knowledge, and these students—ignorant, oddly cynical about life, often uncivil, and incredibly complacent about their ignorance—these students were so self-satisfied and aggressively obtuse that unvaryingly they made her feel a black desire to lash out, a smoldering rage.
    It discouraged her. It made her long for some other task, some other way to spend her time. Though of course she was fairly certain there wasn’t anything that would serve to get her mind off the living she was doing now, with its