the road was dark and bleak. The white sunset was gone and all those who wondered about the nature of things asleep. It was a cold, dead town.
Outside seven holes were buried, former brains, mouths where food went in every day until the day Jeremy Stevenson lost faith. That ain’t a easy thing to say come from me, Steve Merrick, killer of Jed Jones’ father Tom.
Outside a storm was raging. I mean a storm. I was there looking into the window and I saw it there, sir, a chair as a chair dares to be rare, then I’m going to get somewhere, at least in this life, Jed said.
You ain’t nothing boy.
The kid looked at me from across that prison room glass and I knew he’d shot me right between the eyes. ‘Cept he didn’t have no gun. It was the oddest thing.
“I’d a killt you, sir,” Jed said. “I’d of put a gun to your head and pulled the trigger, sir, no longer than it takes a fly to spit on your arm. I’d a done it too. But I grew up and stopped bein’ that little kid who did it every day of his life.”
“You say you’re a friend of my boy Dink?” I asked him.
“I suppose that’s true, sir,” Jed said.
“Well, you just tell him the only way I acted the way I did was because I was too goddamned cold. And you tell him, boy, who can shoot me in the eyes at leisure, that, I’m sorry for his being having with me when worlds were shit.”
“I’ll tell him that, sir.”
“And you tell him that I didn’t know what I was doing. And you tell him that I loved him, okay?”
“Okay?!”
“Yeah, man,” that Jed said.
“Okay, you can go.” I told him. And he did.
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