It was a vast summer night. There was an unusual softness to the dark air and the bland starlight and an unusual density to the darkness so that even on his own land Leander had to move cautiously to keep from stumbling over a stone or stepping into a brier patch. The car had gone off the road at the bend and run into an elm in the old field. Its red tail lamp and one of its headlights were still burning and in this light the grass and the leaves on the elm shone a bright green. Steam, as they approached the car, was escaping from the radiator and hissing, but as they crossed the field this hissing lessened and when they reached the car it had stopped, although the smell of the vapors was still in the air.
“He’s dead,” Leander said. “He’s dead. What a Christly mess. Stay here, Moses. I’ll go up to the house and call the police. You come with me, Coverly. I want you to drive Adelaide home. They’ll be enough trouble without her. He’s dead,” he muttered, and Coverly followed him up the field and across the road to the house where all the windows were being lighted, one by one.
Moses seemed stunned. There was nothing for him to do and then a sound of crackling—he thought Leander or someone had returned and stepped on some brush, crossing a field—made him spin around but the field and the road were empty and he turned back to the car and saw a fire under the vents of the hood. At the same time the clammy smell of dirty steam and rubber was joined by the smell of heated metal and burning paint and while the hood contained the fire its paint began to blister. Then he seized the dead man’s shoulders and tried to pull him out of the car while the fire crackled with the merriment of a hearth fire in a damp house at the end of the day and began to throw a golden light on the trees. The fear of an explosion that might send Moses to join the dead man made his movements hasty and constrained and while he wanted to get away from the fire he could not leave the man there on his pyre and he pulled and pulled until the body, released, sent them both backward into the field. There was sand there at the edge of the path and now he scooped this up with his hands and threw it onto the fire. The sand checked the fire and now he loaded it onto the hood and then knocked the hood open with a stick and threw sand onto the cylinder head until the fire was out and his fear of an explosion was ended and he was left alone in the field, he thought, with the wrecked car and the dead man. He sat down, exhausted, and saw that all of the windows of the farm across the road were lighted and then heard, north of the four corners, a siren and knew that Leander had got the police. He would sit there and catch his breath and his strength, he thought, until they came, when he heard the girl saying from somewhere in the darkness: I’m hurt, Charlie, I’ve hurt myself. Where are you? I’m hurt, Charlie. For a moment Moses thought: I’ll leave her too; but when she spoke again he pushed himself to his feet and went around the car, looking for her. Charlie, she said, I’ve hurt myself, and then he found her and thinking that Moses was the dead man she said: Charlie, oh Charlie, where are we? and began to cry and he knelt beside her where she lay on the ground. By then the sound of the siren had passed the four corners and was bearing down the road and then he heard, from the darkness, Leander’s voice and the voices of the police and saw their flashlights playing over the field—idly, inquisitively—heard their sighs as their idle, inquisitive lights touched the dead man and heard one of them tell another to go to the house and get a blanket. Then they began, idly, to discuss the fire, and Moses called to them and they brought their inquisitive lights over to where he knelt beside the girl. Now they played their lights on the girl, who kept up a bitter light sobbing and who, with her fair hair, seemed very young. “Don’t move her, don’t touch her,” a policeman said importantly. “She may have sustained some internal injuries.” Then one of them told another to get a stretcher and they put her on the stretcher—she was still sobbing—and carried her past the wrecked car and the dead man who was now covered with a blanket toward the many lights of the house.
