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The boy was eight years old when he first saw them materializing out of the mist: a bantam-sized old man in a small straw hat and a giant lumbering man almost as old. Later, the boy's father introduced him to them and the boy was afraid of them because they had bad grammar and looked at him as if they were about to laugh and teased him about getting up late and said a man who got up late never got anywhere. They had big noses and missing teeth and each had a deep abscess scar in his cheek, which gave a look of wild inhaling, and the boy's father later told him that the big man, the son, was sub-normal. The boy would remember them as smelling of damp cloth and mildew and something he couldn't name, and it was only a long time afterward that he realized they had smelled of death. The year was 1963.

The boy's name was Henry and his parents had just bought the farm where he first saw the two men. During the week, his father worked fifty miles away in Toronto, and there at the farm his mother wrote articles on foreign affairs and talked on the telephone while Henry watched television. To Henry the country seemed dry and dead. He wanted to be back in the city, but his mother kept telling him to play outside and finally he went out.

At first it looked like nothing, like wreckage. There was a feeling of oldness in the cracked siding of the Barn, in the rusted pieces of implements and harness; in the panic of pigeons that blew up when he entered the loft, their diaphanous passage across the cracks of light; in the shit, the dust and the decay rising like acrid smoke in the strips of light. He found pieces of enamelware that people must have eaten and drunk out of. And outside, in the field, he found bones. He did not know whether they were animal bones, but he imagined them as human-bones from disinterments at midnight.

At lunch one day his mother went on about why he didn't draw or read or use his imagination, and reminded him that his friends were ahead of him. About to cry, he ran outside. He wasn't supposed to go near the highway, but he ran across the road and went up the sloping fields. There was an abandoned house on a ridge and by the time he got there he was scratched by barbed wire and tall-standing weeds, and even though it looked smaller close up, the house seemed suddenly dangerous. But he couldn't go back, so he pushed at the door until it gave. Inside he found an old edition of The Wizard of Oz torn and scattered across the floor on top of some girls' dresses, all of it covered with bird shit, and the plaster was fallen from the laths, the panes gone from the windows. He found a medicine cabinet with bottles inside that said 1926 and a tin of brilliantine still marked by fingertips and overalls hanging on the wall. He looked around upstairs and when he came down he heard someone shout and when he went out the door, he saw a red faced man in overalls yelling and the man fired a shotgun and the boy went running through high weeds as a charge of salt whizzed past his legs.

He was afraid that if he told his parents they would talk to the red faced man, so he said nothing. It was around then that the two old men started coming. The older man's name was Mr. Beedon and the son was named Alf and they came in an old black 1949 Dodge to cut cedar fence posts. Henry's father was renting out pasture for grazing and the old man, Beedon, was going to help replace the fencing. They were talking to Henry's father about distances in chains and rods, and after a silence the big man, Alf, said solemnly, "Cranshaws stole timber off this place once," and spat absently through the gap in his teeth. And the old man looked at him, his toothless mouth a moment agonized and snapped, "That's enough out of you, you don't know what you're talking about." When Alf continued, the old man sharply kicked him in the shin. "We won't hear no more out of you," he said. And Alf nodded silently as if to affirm what he'd managed to say. Henry wondered who Cranshaws were.

A few days later, he was playing in a field beyond the barn, wielding a stick as a sword and attacking an army of milkweed. He turned and saw standing behind him a boy, a couple of years older, slouching with a rifle cradled in his forearm, the heel of one foot in the instep of the other, like the photograph of Billy the Kid. There was no wind and the sky behind him was grey, even. Grey like a tintype. He said he'd been hunting groundhogs in their long field and spoke slowly and formally, saying he knew the day Henry's parents had arrived there; who had owned the property back three generations; that twenty years ago a child had died falling into a well on that property and there were things in the area Henry's family would never know about. Henry thought of the name Cranshaw and looked at the boy and the boy went off and Henry went back to the milkweed and turned and the boy was gone out of thin air.

On Sunday night Henry's father was leaving for the city when he told the boy that he was to help the old man put in fence posts and that it would make a man of him. Henry lay awake that night thinking of the toothless abscess scars and the faded smell; of Beedon's pale eyes that seemed to see through everything and of the old man kicking his son.

In the morning Beedon took him out to the boundary line. The old man sighted the fence line and told Henry to shift the crowbar until it was in line. Beedon marked the ground and lifted the sod with the shovel and dug the hole. They began to put the posts in and the boy was pounding in the dirt when there was a shout, a bark: "What the Sam Hill you done! Look! Looka that!" The boy had trampled half the dirt back into the grass so that the old man had to scrape it back to fill in the post. His eyes were wild with outrage and he said if there wasn't enough earth to fill it up level the rain would get in and rot the wood in seven instead of fifteen years and the fence would be down and cattle would get out and destroy a crop and there would be a lawsuit.

Later Henry saw the old man staring at a great elm tree. He predicted that it would survive the elm disease. Then he said there was an elm tree down in Goodwood that was so big it yielded forty cords of firewood. Later that afternoon he said that in 1931 he had won a bet estimating the height of the tallest church spire in the township.

The following day, the boy watched while Beedon used an axe-head to make machine-perfect notches in the anchor posts for the brace poles as he named the local farmers who had cheated him out of wages. He named the few people in the area who were "all right" and the majority who were "no good." He told the boy of people committed to the insane asylum at Whitby, of a barn fire that he was sure was arson, of the daughter of a storekeeper who had died drinking muriatic acid, of a butcher who had hanged himself.

For several days they worked, the old man talking on as if to himself. He began to stretch the wire, levering each strand taut with a crowbar, one leg raised with the strain while the boy hammered, terrified of bending the staples. When it seemed he was doing it right, Henry asked how the village had been started. After a moment the old man said, "Cranshaws." The boy wondered why they would have stolen wood from the lot, but said nothing and then Beedon said, "They come from up by Leith originally. People said they were no good." Henry had driven near there with his father. It was in a stark plain off the highway a few miles north of the village, a place where you could see a four-story hotel from miles away. The old man said that long ago Cranshaws were the cause of a lot of trouble, but much of what people said about them was lies.

"What kind of trouble?" Henry said.

"They were always fightin'. Fightin' all the time...You didn't want to get in trouble with them." Then he paused and muttered, "They run the township at one time."

The fence was soon done. The old man was gone. At the end of August, the boy and his parents returned to Toronto. That winter his mother told him they'd be going up there on weekends. He looked forward to it now. The Beedons had no telephone, and when Henry and his mother and father drove up, they took a long detour on some side roads to ask if Beedon and his son could come on Saturday to cut firewood. On the way, Henry heard his parents remarking that Beedons had been there for eighty-odd years, and didn't seem to have a single friend in the area. His mother wondered if they'd been ostracized.

Henry was nervous about going into their house, because his mother had told him they were poor. They reached a high bare ridge and skidded down a snowbound lane and went up onto the veranda of a stone house and were let in by Beedon's wife, twisted and beaky like an ancient bird in men's shoes and with glasses held together with tape. There was a blast of dry heat from a wood stove and in the one room where they lived the wallpaper was torn and water stained. The old man, bald and white and without his hat, sat in a rocker and Alf watched television, drinking beer, and the old woman sat and stared with her arms folded and it smelled of that same dank oldness. This is not now, he thought, this is then. This is how it was; and it's still here, in this strange light in this house high on this hill at night.

***

The following June, at the farm, Beedon put in the gardens and the vegetable patch and Henry ran and got things for him. After a while he noticed the old man standing, his hands on his hips, looking down and thinking, and then he said something about cutting thistles and said, "You may as well come down." The old man didn't need the boy's help, but he wanted him along, and it was then that Henry thought, "I'm one of them," and realized only later that "them" were the inhabitants of the old man's world, the gone world. The land was dry and dusty, and the sky was purple-black over the village and there was fork lightning and the starlings were crowded along the telephone lines and the branches hung dusty and still, and when Beedon began to talk as he swung the scythe the air was pregnant with something terrible.

He worked with the old man every day now. As Beedon cut wood and cleared thistles and mused aloud, half to himself, the boy learned that he had rented and lived and worked at twenty-seven houses in that one county over sixty-odd years. He had had thirty-four employers. Small as he was, he had won fights over girls outside dance halls in 1906 and 1910 at places that had once been crossroads and now were weedy outlines in fields. He had been the only one who could lift a full-grown heifer into the back of a wagon. And he mentioned names: names he had worked for; names with whom he had fought over the price of fence wire, over wages; names he had accused of inexplicable acts of malice.

At the end of the week some friends of Henry's mother arrived from England and they were having tea and she wanted Henry to be there, and she was calling him, but he went on up the hill and joined the old man, who was stringing barbed wire. Again, Beedon began to talk. He talked of various people he had worked for who told him of place after place that had burned, and he murmured, "Of course that was the time of the arson, there."

"What's arson?" the boy said.

The old man looked at him and said, "Settin fires," then added, "There were six Cranshaw sons; some of them were all right and some were no good."

"Did you know them?" the boy asked.

The old man paused and withdrew the wire stretcher and moved on. "I knew a couple of them, but I never had no trouble with them, not really. Most of it happened round when I was born."

"When were you born?" the boy asked.

"I was born in 1879," Beedon said.

***

The following day the boy was with him when he was hoeing the tomatoes and the old man said that as far as Cranshaws were concerned, one thing was true: they had higher yields than anyone could explain. They even bought the two three-story hotels in Leith that stood across the street from each other and loomed in a single black block on the horizon. But in his opinion it was Bascombs who were no good. Bascombs were the oldest and biggest landowners in the area and after Cranshaws arrived, that was when the arson started. Hooligans used it as an excuse and the hotel saloons were nicknamed "the buckets of blood" and both hotels were gutted by arson.

Beedon broke for lunch and Henry went in and put the lunch his mother had made into a plastic bag like the bag Beedon brought his lunch in and he went into the driving shed and sat by him on the sill beam. The boy asked him why the Cranshaws were so bad and the old man squinted out into the light.

"They had something, somethin' about them," he said, "I don't know what it was." He said they had wit; they had the best women, the best coaches, the best harness and the best clothes and "everybody had somethin' to say about them. But it wasn't just that, it was somethin' else." It sounded like something evil and knowing that still resided behind wallpaper and warped walls in old houses.

"And then there was more trouble and they killed them one night," Beedon said. "They killed most of them, anyway. It was in the winter of '81."

"Where?" Henry said.

"Up by Leith," he said. "I was - Gol - I was two year old, I guess."

"Why did they kill them?"

"They say Bascombs done it," and he told the boy about being taken into Leith by his father a few years afterward and his father pointing out the notorious Willy Bascomb laughing and trying to make a horse kick in front of the post office. And there was still the fear, but by then it was fear of Bascombs, not Cranshaws.

"People sold and moved out," he said, "because of the murder and the burnings." And then in 1895, they diverted the railroad and a few years later they put in a highway five miles east and that was the end of Leith. The town that had once dominated the countryside shrank to nothing and it was as if nothing had happened there.

It felt to the boy like a secret, and when he overheard his parents talking about how much time he spent with the old man he wanted to tell them to mind their own business. It seemed to interest them the way the markings on finches or Roman bronzes did and he swore he would never interest them anymore and they would never know his world.

A few days later his mother said to him that Beedon had asked if, instead of paying him for finishing the zucchini patch, Henry could help him on a job near the village of Purdew. Henry's heart beat faster, because Purdew was near Leith.

"I'll talk to him about it," Henry said offhandedly and that made his mother laugh and he hid his fury. This job made him one of them, side by side with the old man and Alf.

***

They went in Alf's car several miles north of the village to the land that was flat by a crossroads, and the remaining hotel was still large and stark. Leith was a cracked asphalt detour and wizened main street off the highway, with a garage, a couple of stores overgrown with weeds and the old hotel dominating the shrunken country. They turned onto a side road, a tired vector over flat fields that looked old, and they slowed at a lane. Two boys idled on bicycles. When they turned, one of the boys cut slowly across in front of them, and the paleness of his face and the humped boniness of his back made Henry think of milk out of a barn a long time ago, and both boys rode close to the windows and said something as the car drove in along the lane.

The car went through alfalfa to a fence that went to the horizon, and a man called Purvis, who had lost part of his nose, showed them where the fence was down and his cattle had got into an infant cemetery that was abandoned and overgrown. They set up an electric battery, and Beedon said the children had died because of bad well-water. The land was so flat that it seemed to Henry that the children had been killed by the weight of the sky. It was different here; there was an immensity. There was power and sadness.

They strung the electric wire in silence. There was no wind now. As if he were picking up where he had left off, but again talking to himself, Beedon said that the Bascombs had had so much influence that those who had killed Cranshaws were found not guilty.

"But that one brother knew who did it," Alf said.

As if his son had not spoken, Beedon said that one Cranshaw, Robert, was absent from the house on the night of the murders, and years later a Justice of the Peace gave that Cranshaw some papers that would have convicted Willie Bascomb and the rest of them. Alf nodded. The crickets were deafening and the old man said that when Robert Cranshaw died in 1911 no one knew where he had kept the papers. But Beedon thought the papers were still in Cranshaw's house.

Alf said, "On the eighth line of Victoria there," and the old man shouted at him, "There's nobody in it now anyway, you - !" and sent Henry back out to the road to flag down a truck delivering fence posts.

The two boys were there, idling on bicycles. They were older than he was, with big pale muscles. It was all theirs: the white dust, the heavy roadside grass, the fences, the distance. He tried to stare back at them and they said something and he heard them laugh. A stone sailed slowly past his head and he knew that what they were doing was old and worse because of it. The sky was now wan, the sky after a calamity, yet too vast to have changed so quickly. A fast stone hit him in the shoulder and the truck came down the road and Henry raised his hand and went into the lane. Stones whipped past his head and he had to run behind the truck.

When the work was done and the old men and the boy came out to the road, the older boys were still there in the twilight and staring again and in their faces, half obliterated by the darkness, the boy saw the thickness of ninety years. Beedon and Alf knew who they were and they went toward the Dodge and a pebble bounded off the hood and Alf turned back toward them, rolling his sleeve like a cartoon brawler and the boys rode slowly away and Alf said, "Mallen boys." In the car, the fields passed in darkness and Alf said there was a Bascomb in the mental hospital in Whitby who was supposed to have sworn that if he ever got out he'd burn the Cranshaw house to the ground because of the papers that were there. Beedon told him not to say what he didn't know.

***

For a while Beedon only came to cut the grass. Henry was watching Sea Hunt when his mother came upstairs and said he was watching television when he had agreed not to and there were shelves full of books downstairs. There was James Fenimore Cooper and Alice in Wonderland and Dickens, which she herself had started reading when she was younger than he was, and if he didn't start now, he would stay second rate. It seemed he was the one thing that hadn't worked out in his parents' world of international travel, business and writing and life in the country, and after she left he squeezed his fist until it was white and cried. It was still before dinner and he went out the back door.

He went up through the village and onto a side road that climbed the long slope to the ridge, and he kept walking as if by walking far enough he would eventually have no connection with either of his parents and could say he was from somewhere else. He went up a lane and the land fell away in nameless violence into the twilight and he went to the stone house and an acre of cut grass and a few bleeding hearts in front of the porch. Beedon's wife was there and she let him in and the old woman gave him supper and he watched television. Beedon came in and neither the old man nor the old woman said much to each other or to the boy and Henry watched Gunsmoke while Beedon ate.

The boy slept on a settee under coats. In the morning there was mist and he went out to the barn with the old man, and on the way there was a sweet manure and sour milking smell that felt remembered.

Then his father came and got him and on the way back gave him a reprimand, and at home his mother sat him down and explained at length that they had been upset only because they loved him. It was a love he didn't understand, did not even think much about, and a week later, when he saw the trail of black smoke going up on the horizon, he knew they could not see what he saw because it was from eighty years ago. He and Beedon had been down in the cedar bush where the old man was cutting burdocks and Alf had come to drive him home. Henry climbed into the car and they drove up to Leith. Before the side road with the infant cemetery, there was an unpainted house at a weedy corner by the highway, devoured in smoke and fire. There were cars all along the shoulder and a crowd and they got out and walked along and Alf addressed several people who did not respond or even look at him and Beedon snapped at him to keep to himself. As they drove back Henry asked how it had happened and Beedon murmured, "It was set."

When the boy got home he mentioned the fire to his mother, but refused to say anything more and went to his room and the smudge in the sky was still there in the distance, alive and present and fading the way the past was.

***

It was late summer and there was little work left for the old man to do and even though another spring would come, the boy feared never seeing the old man again. Henry's mother sent him up the hill to pick apples and he had begun to fill the basket when he saw the boy with the rifle again and he had his heel in his instep and the rifle cradled like before. And the sky was again grey, the grey of an old photograph, and there was that oldness and a sort of gone evil and the older boy spoke with slow formality and Henry said nothing and then there was just silence and the boy with the rifle said, "Likely the old fellow that works for you told you about it, eh?" They're still alive, Henry thought, they are still here among us.

"We don't talk about it," the boy with the rifle said. He squinted at Henry a long time and then said, "But that old man, he don't care. 'Cause all he was after was if you paid him good you were all right and he had less trouble with Bob Cranshaw over money and all that than he did with some other people." He went on speaking with a sort of knowing, slow vengeance. "I know he worked for Bob Cranshaw, ploughin' for him, nineteen-o-six, nineteen-o-nine when nobody else would because of what had happened and all. That's why he went up with you and his son to see the fire in Leith there, 'cause he knew it was Cranshaw's." The boy with the rifle had his chest out and his neck back like a fighting cock as if he owned the land and the past in some way, and said, "I know it was Jordie Bascomb done it. 'Cause he just come out of the mental hospital."

And Henry thought of the Bascomb who was afraid of the papers. "People won't talk to the old man Beedon 'cause he worked for Bob Cranshaw," the kid with the rifle said. "That's why them kids were throwin' stones at you over in Purdew. 'Cause they're Mallens." Then he went away.

***

In Toronto, in September, there were two worlds. There was the present world of school and his faltering marks and there was the world of the land fifty miles away, dead-still before a storm; of barns and lightning and the old man, always seen from behind: the baggy, indigo trousers and the 'Y' of his suspenders and the straw hat. And beyond him, infinity, haze receding into silence.

In November Henry arrived home from a friend's house, with the image of the old man, faceless, his arms out as if he were about to fight or as if he were holding an invisible plough, and the boy was sitting down to his milk and cookies in the kitchen when his mother came in looking in a way he had never seen her. At the office, his father had just died of a heart attack. In the living- room, the boy sat beside her while she held her face in her hands and then he sat on his bed thinking that he had never gotten to know his father and now he never would and for a while he cried. The following day after school he played ball hockey and did his homework and had supper at his friend's house and afterward they laughed hard at a show on television. He went home and found his mother on the telephone to friends and she kept drying her eyes.

In March, the snow was almost gone and the trees were wet and black and he asked his mother when they were going up to the farm and she said, "I don't know, we may not be able to keep it," and turned back to her typewriter. He went to the front door, opened it, kicked it as hard as he could and went out slamming it. When he came back at supper she said nothing except that what he had done was boorish and uncivilized and if there was something that bothered him he should say what it was. She added that they would have other places to go during the summer.

That spring his mother refused to talk about the farm; all she would say was that she would probably sell it. But for the time being she wanted to see if there was any way of renting out more of the pasture. She was going to make inquiries and on the second weekend of April they drove out to the country. When they got there the snow was not yet gone and the boy played in the fields and watched the mist rising out of the ground and the still-dead pasture materialized as he had remembered it.

They had just had lunch and he was doing his homework when his mother got off the telephone and came in and paused and looked at him and said that she was sorry but that Beedon had died. He went out to the barn, and he went out to the pasture, but it was all like the old man. He went up to his room, where he kept walking around and sitting down and when he came down for dinner he couldn't eat. His mother told him he could stop from crying by distracting himself and she tried to hug him, but he pulled away and she told him that if it was any help, they'd be coming back for at least half the summer.

On Sunday night they went back to the city. At school, at recess, he thought of running down into a nearby ravine because it was like the country and there were still ruined sections of farm fencing there and then he thought of running away altogether. He didn't know where he would go, but he wanted to go into something, something ancient and absolute, a place as familiar and age-old as his own hand.

That fall, his mother sold the farm.

***

Four years later, when he was fourteen, he was in Coles when he saw a large illustrated book called The Cranshaw Affair; the Photographic History, 1845-1890. There were faces and fields and storefronts in decaying black and white and he recognized it, recognized the same oldness. There were fragments of things that were still there in a landscape already as eaten-down and faded and rich with old corn as the country he had known. Many of the things in the book the old man had told him and many things he hadn't and there were things the old man had said that weren't in the book. But from something about the old man himself, he recognized the satanic extravagance in the lapels of the Cranshaw boys, as if the image had only sharpened. Then it would all fade and later would return again as dark and splendid as the rotted cloth and broken enamel and rusted wire he had found in stables and farmhouses, and the vicious grandeur of the people who had used them. And he read and re-read statements to a magistrate about Robert Cranshaw's attempted murder of a town constable and his beating of one of the Bascombs in the main street, once monumental and now small and vacant.

Sometimes, when he was on the verge of sleep or just waking, he saw the old man there. He was there in a land of crowded empty bottles and broken insulators, of dust and mildew and crumbling plaster; always facing away, just the Y of his suspenders and his small straw hat and beyond them both the darkening country; and the boy wanted to go after him into a world of thunder skies and arson and magnificence and living side roads. And Robert Cranshaw, who had once had twenty-eight charges of assault against him and nine of arson, who had lived and fought at the same time as the outlaws of the American West, would say to the old man in 1909, "We've got to re-fence that whole part by the stream, I've already had cattle through there and I don't want any trouble now."

The boy would lie awake seeing it over and over until the grey pasture bleached into faded colour and light and all would start to move and the old man would finally turn to him and say, "You may as well come down." And Henry would go down with them, he would go down with them to the pasture, forever.