Laura looked at him then and started to say something, but it never came out. They sat without words listening for the hissing chatter of pebbles twisting under tires, for voices and the sound of an engine; waiting for a wide nose and a grinning silver mouth to come into sight where the road curved. Mr. Rebeck wanted to hold Laura's hand, or put his hand on Michael's shoulder, but he could not. He found a hole in one of his socks and worked his finger around in it, watching the tear grow bigger.

They waited, but nothing came. There was only the noise of grasshoppers.

"Nothing," Michael said at last. "I must be overeager."

"I can't imagine you killing yourself," Mr. Rebeck said almost wonderingly. "Even now I can't really picture it."

"Nor I," Michael said, "then or now. It's hard to explain, but I never knew I was going to kill myself, not the way we think of knowing—planning it, living with it, waking up in the morning and saying, 'Two days from now I will take poison and die.' That takes something I don't have. Even when I looked up the lethal dosage and wrote it down, it was just for the hell of it, intellectual curiosity. Something to bring up during a lull in the conversation. But I can't remember ever saying to myself, 'Look, I don't want to live any more. I'm going to kill myself as quickly as possible and get the whole thing over with.' I never said that."

He looked at Laura again. "I think that's what Laura can't forgive me. She wants her suicides to be honest with themselves, to choose a death and seek it out boldly. I couldn't do that. I wasn't brave enough or honest enough. Laura is disappointed in me. Perfectly understandable."

"It isn't that at all," Laura said. She did not turn her head. "I haven't the right to ask anybody to be honest. It isn't that. But leaving your death on your wife's doorstep, dying so that she would die—I don't know how to talk myself past that, Michael. If I could, I would."

"Yes. That was bad."

Feeling the need to touch life, Mr. Rebeck reached out and tentatively smoothed the raven's black plumage with his hand. When the bird flinched but did not draw away, he let his hand remain lightly on the dusty feathers. He could feel the raven's heart beating.

"Maybe he didn't know," he said. "It's possible. You do so many things and never know you've done them. He didn't know Sandra would be blamed for his death."

Michael shook his head. "I knew. Thank you just the same." He did not look at any of them, nor was he looking down the road. He seemed to be staring with great interest at a white cloud shaped like a horse's head.

"I knew," he said. "There isn't any real way around it. I felt that Sandy had driven me to suicide, and that it was only right that she suffer for it. Funny that I should become such a great believer in justice. I always used to open my history courses by telling the students that if they expected to hear a series of movie scenarios, with the good guys winning in the end, they might as well all go home because not only didn't the good guys win, but there weren't any good guys."

"They have to go to college to learn that?" the raven asked. "Hell, birds know it before they know they're birds."

"People know it too," Michael said, "but it worries them a bit, and they like to avoid the whole subject. I used to tell my classes, 'There is no justice. Justice is a man-made concept, a foreign body in the universe. Tigers are neither just nor unjust when they kill goats, or men, for that matter. There is no such thing as abstract justice. There is such a thing as law. The difference should be apparent.' It's old stuff, not in the least original with Morgan, but the students were very impressed."

Laura said nothing, and Michael sighed. "What can I tell you, Laura? That I confused justice and revenge? People do that a great deal, and they always have. That's no excuse. I never admitted that I thought my wife ought to die for causing my death, but that was the idea. It seemed very fair."

"And all your anger at death," Laura said. "Was that a lie? All the struggling to stay close to life, and all the crying that Sandra had murdered you—did you know all the time?"

"No. Not until the raven came. I didn't remember anything about my death. Only that there was poison and that it had a lot to do with Sandra. That was all."

Still Laura bent her head and would not look at him, and suddenly Michael was shouting. "God damn it, how do you think I feel?" His voice tolled in Mr. Rebeck's head, and it hurt the small man to listen. There seemed to be a great pendulum swinging sluggishly inside his head.

"How do you think I feel, knowing that I was bored enough with myself to stop myself, and vengeful enough to try to drag someone with me? Knowing nakedly, without any possible way of shading my eyes from it, that I'm a liar, and a coward, and a murderer in everything but deed? Knowing that I never loved Sandra, and tried to destroy her because she didn't love me? And I planned it. I planned the whole rickety, childish, murderous thing, and then forgot all about it because it didn't go with the picture I had of myself. God, what a man I was. How I must have hated."

"I wouldn't bang my head on the floor quite that much," the raven said. "Nothing you can do about it now. Anyway, they let her off. Happy ending. The rest doesn't matter."

Michael shook his head. "It matters. How it ends isn't important any more." His voice was quieter. "Funny to find out I didn't love Sandra. I always thought I did."

Mr. Rebeck felt the raven's compact body moving under his hand and thought, I wish this had not happened. With all my heart, I wish it were June again, late spring, before the heat came, and none of this had happened. He saw Laura gradually raise her eyes to Michael's eyes, and knew without surprise what had happened between them that morning. I suppose it is a wonderful thing, he thought, even a kind of miracle, but I cannot seem to react to it properly. I am too old for sudden beauty, beauty that is born without budding and dies without bearing. What will happen to them now?

Oh, I wish to God it were spring again, late spring, before the heat came.

Michael's voice was low as he spoke to Laura. "The chase is over. The Morgan-hunt is over. I know what I am. I am everything I feared in life, everything I hated in other people, falseness and brutality and mindless arrogance. And I have to drag them with me, wherever I am dragged, because they are part of me, skin and skeleton. I can never hide from them again."

"That's not true," Laura said. "You're kind, and gentle, and no more evil than breakfast or sunset. Don't you think I know?"

"No. I don't think you do know, Laura, because I didn't myself until just now. I can't fall back on kindness now that nothing else is left. When I was young, I thought I was very kind. I thought that I hated meanness and brutality simply because they were evil in themselves. As I grew up I learned that I hated to see people in pain because I could imagine myself suffering in their places. I always had a very good imagination. Now I see that I made great gestures against these things because they were in me, and I knew it and didn't dare admit it."

"They're in all of us," Laura said desperately. "They're in me. Michael, listen."

Michael went on. "So I told myself that I was kind and gentle, and other people believed it, and I even believed myself, and look at this thing I've done, Laura. Look at what I've done."

This time they all heard the sound of the truck and knew that the men had come even before they saw the truck. Mr. Rebeck had expected one of the shining black hearses with long tonneaus and shaded windows that he had so often seen sliding along the roads of the cemetery. But what came to get Michael was a large, open-backed truck with a green cab that gleamed as if it had been painted that morning. There were four men, three sitting in front and one in the back, leaning against a rusty red winch that stood up like the fin of a lean fish. The truck's engine was oddly soft and muffled, even when it was very close.