And in the end my mother was followed one night, and abducted, and driven some distance and held in the car at knifepoint while someone whose face she couldn't see explained that if they didn't stop digging then their next homes would be shallow and for ever and in a forest where nobody walked. She was raped, by four men, before being thrown out of the car on the edge of town, naked and with her hair cut off.
After that my father changed. He hunted them down. For four months he and my mother left the world and everyone in it behind, plunging deeper into darkness until they found the candle shedding light in its centre. The others never knew the details of what went on during this time, only that my parents had changed. They still saw the Hopkinses, but now that they were no longer fighting the good fight there didn't seem as much to hold the group together. Don began to talk about strange things, about some big, loose conspiracy run by people trying to break down our society from within. The other three wouldn't listen, not at first. It sounded too much like the ravings of a couple whose grip on reality was no longer reliable.
And then one night the two of them had come into the bar where they all usually met. Mary had been drunk, after an argument with Davids, and didn't even speak to them. My father had taken Harold to one side and talked to him urgently. At first Harold had been reluctant, but in the end the three left together, leaving Mary in the bar with Lazy Ed. These two did the obvious thing and got shit-faced and then went into the woods and slept together. By the Lost Pond, in fact. Harold and Mary had stopped living with each other pretty soon afterwards.
The other three had driven for four hours to a place up in the hills of southern Oregon. They had been armed, and they came upon the place quietly. My mother and father had somewhat lost their perspective by this point, though they might have believed they had found it — that they had learned the harsh lesson that when it comes to the struggle between the people who believed in life, and those who believed in death, the battle had to be fought on the latter's terms.
The camp was in a clearing half a mile off the road, deep in the forest. A cluster of cabins, hand-built and arranged in a circle, the way things used to be. After my mother had looked at each man and confirmed they had been involved in the incident, the three moved quickly, and they shot everyone they found.
There was silence in Harold's living room.
'You went in and shot everyone? My parents shot people?'
'Not the women and children,' Davids said. 'And we didn't shoot to kill. But we shot the men. Each of
them. In the leg. Or the shoulder. Or the balls. Depending.'
'I don't blame them,' I said. I didn't know whether I meant this or not. I probably did. 'If what you're saying is true, then I don't blame either of them for what they did.'
'Oh it's true,' he said. 'I was there. The last man we found was the one who'd held the knife to your mother's throat. We didn't realize it then, but this wasn't just some group of rednecks off on their own. They had a cause. They've always been around. Your parents found this man sitting alone in his cabin. And your father, the great Don Hopkins, junior realtor, put a gun to his face and shot him dead.'
I tried to see that night, to see my father in that position, and I realized I had never really known him at all. I felt as if information was spilling out of my eyes.
'Then they heard a sound from the other room in the cabin, and Beth went through. The man's wife had left him, or he'd killed her. Either way she'd left their children behind. Twins, barely six months old, wrapped together in a little cot and now orphans. Two little children, exactly what Beth most wanted and couldn't have.' Davids shook his head. 'At least, that's the way they told it. I wasn't there for that part. Perhaps they saw the children first. Maybe Beth found the little ones and your father thought he saw a way to make up for what had been done to her. Maybe they decided that they were allowed one shot to kill.'
'My parents weren't liars,' I said.
'So you knew about all this, did you?'
'They weren't liars,' I repeated, uselessly. 'And this is all crap.'
'What happened to the children?' Bobby asked.
'We brought them back to Hunter's Rock. Don and Beth raised them for a while. But in the end it was decided that they had to be separated. Beth was very, very unhappy about the idea, and so was your father, but the rest of us decided that it simply wasn't safe. The babies weren't the only thing taken from the man's cabin. We found a lot of papers and books. Some were very, very old. There was proof that your parents had been right. There was a conspiracy. The people up in the woods were part of it. Beth and Don thought that they would be able to change the way you were, that environment was more important. It was very big back then, that idea. Not so popular now, of course, not with all this fuss about the human DNA thing and all that. Now everyone thinks that chemicals explain everything.'
'The babies were split up,' Bobby said.
'They kept one, and the other was taken far away. The idea was that they might stand more of a chance if they didn't have each other to reinforce the way they were. Or maybe it was a neat little experiment, Ward, cooked up by your father. Nature versus nurture. I didn't ever really understand.'
'Versus what nature, Harold? If this is true, and all this happened, why the big fear about the nature of
the babies?'
'Well,' he said. 'Because of your genes, of course. Because you were so non-viral. So pure.'
'Jesus Christ,' I shouted, 'You don't believe that shit, do you? You don't really think…' I stopped,
suddenly blindsided. 'Wait a minute. This has to do with the social virus idea?'
'Of course. But how do you know about it?'
'We found The Straw Men's Web site.'
'But how do you even know about them?'
'Dad left a video,' I said. 'I had just found it when you came to the house that time. It had all of you on
it, though I didn't realize at first. He left me a note, too. Saying they weren't dead.' Davids shook his head, and smiled faintly. 'Don,' he said. 'He always planned ahead.' His smile was
affectionate, but not only that.
'But if all this happened in Hunter's Rock,' Bobby said, 'how come you all came here?'
'We hung together for a few more years. We had some good nights, but it wasn't the way it had been. After a while I left. I came to Dyersburg. To start again. Mary came out a year later. It didn't work. But she stayed in town. For a long time after that, we were out of contact with the others. Partly it was thought to be for the best. Also, well… we'd done some pretty bad things. On the night it had seemed the right thing to do. We got caught up in it, I guess. Frustration that nothing in the world had changed, despite everything we had done, and we were still at the mercy of men like that. But afterwards it wasn't something that any of us really wanted to remember. For Mary and Ed it wasn't so bad. They hadn't actually been there. But they were our friends, and so part of the blame bled off onto them. They knew about it, and kept it a secret with us.'
'My father and Ed bumped into each other once,' I said. 'Long time ago. I was there. They pretended they'd never met each other.'
'Not surprised,' Davids said. 'I don't think your father really trusted Ed to keep quiet. Though he did.'
'Did you know he was dead?'
'Not until you said so,' he said. 'I knew about Mary. I didn't think they'd go back for him. He wasn't
even there.'
A car drove past outside, and Davids's head turned like it was on a string. He waited until the sound had disappeared. I'd never seen a man who looked more as if he was expecting bad things to turn up at
his door.
'If you guys were supposed to be keeping apart, how come my parents relocated up here?'
'After over twenty years, and nothing happening, nobody coming for us, I guess Don started to feel that it was over. He was sometimes out this way on business, and he visited me a couple of times, and we shot a little pool, got to talking about old times. Before that bad night. The fun we'd had. The period when we felt like we were going to change the world. At first it was strange, and then it was like the other decades hadn't happened. He brought your mother up here for a weekend, and eventually they decided to move. Get the old gang back together. Be young again.'
'So how come they never told me that you'd known each other before?'
'Because…' Davids sighed. 'Because The Halls started construction just before they settled here, and Don got to hear about it. He got in touch, pitched to them. He wanted the business. He got it. And after a while he started to think there was something weird going on. After that, he decided we had to go back to pretending. He didn't really grow old, Don. Not like the rest of us. Your mother either, I guess. Most of us, comes a time when you're prepared to let things lie. Not Don. You put a secret in front of him, and
he had to know what it was. He had to understand.'
I nodded. This was true. 'So what happened?'
'He started poking around. Trying to find out who was behind the development, what they were up to. He became convinced it was the same people he'd run into years before, in Oregon. Well, not the same guys, but a better connected example of the same kind of people. That they were part of some worldwide movement. Some hidden group, moving behind the scenes.' He shook his head.
'You didn't think so?'
'I don't know what I thought. I just wanted him to leave it alone. Some people put too high a premium on the truth, Ward. Sometimes the truth isn't what you want to know. Sometimes the truth is best left to