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When the man who calls himself Hampnie Hambart finds them in the shepherd's shelter high on the mountainside, he is at first an impeccable guest. His breath catches ever so slightly when he steps inside and sees Julie's wife, but then his expression smooths over, and Julie thinks it will be all right.
He asks Julie's daughter questions about her daily chores and pays attention to the answers. He looks hard into Julie's wife's face, but only when she's speaking, and otherwise he doesn't stare. When Julie asks if they can talk outside, he agrees.
He listens without interruption to what Julie thinks of as an explanation and only later realizes was a plea. Then he walks back into the house.
Julie should have shot him then, and kept shooting. Maybe if he'd blown Hampnie's brains out it would have bought them enough time to run. He thinks that if he'd had the foresight and the guts to pull the trigger he wouldn't have stopped there. After firing every bullet he had to hand, he would have swung a machete and then a mallet at his old friend's wounds, driving shards of bone through flesh and spreading flesh across the stones like jam.
The Broken Toy would have recovered from that. Probably. But not quickly. Julie and his family wouldn't have stayed to watch the grisly miracle take place.
But none of that happens. Julie is not quick enough for any of that, neither in reflex nor in thought. Instead Hampnie Hambart comes at Julie's wife with his own very sharp knife.
Julie doesn't see it - her last shocked expression, the knife sinking in and slicing. If he couldn't have stopped it, he wishes he could have caught her eye in that moment, and witnessed with her.
His daughter doesn't see it either, Hampnie having chosen a moment just as she took the plates out of the room.
But they see the result, and catch each other's eyes in fear and desperation. Hampnie has half-severed Julie's wife's neck; she can't speak.
Julie feels the air leave his lungs too.
"There's a gravekeeper down the path," Hampnie says levelly, bracing Julie's wife's shoulder so that she doesn't completely collapse as she falls to her knees. "We met at the base of the mountain, and she told me the dead called her up here, and I suggested we walk the same way. When I understood that we had the same destination, I asked her to wait. Your wife doesn't have to suffer."
Julie screams, then, an ugly sound that gives him no relief at all.
He reaches for his gun then, and Hampnie gestures as if to say go ahead, and Julie stops. Not in front of his daughter. Not when it's so pointless.
"Get out," Julie says raggedly, and he doesn't see Hampnie Hambart for six long years.
The gravekeeper is kind, and answers his daughter's questions. She lets Julie's daughter touch her mother's face before the first shovel of dirt falls into the already-prepared grave. Julie wonders if, until that moment, his wife was still aware, holding still, trying to play dead to spare her daughter doubt about whether she could have been saved.
Not that they manage to spare his daughter very much, that day.
And yet Julie knows that his wife's sudden, brutal end isn't what made the most impression on his daughter. Afterwards, he forces himself to see all the times she looked at her mother uncertainly, watching too long, quivering - he won't say she flinched.
"If I die," she says, suddenly, finally, weeks after they leave her mother behind.
"What's this nonsense? You won't die, blossom," he says, because that's what a father says.
"If I die," she says. "I don't want to stay. I don't want to go on - being dead."
"That scares you," Julie says.
"Yes."
"It's not that bad," Julie suggests, because who has the right of it? Who the hell does Hampnie think he is, setting such a damn example? But her mouth sets in a stubborn line; she's too old to accept his reassurances, and too young to shoulder existence's mess.
And for a while, their luck holds, and Julie gets his silent wish: that he won't have to face that idea. He teaches his daughter to swim in a gentle stream, and they pick the first berries of summer together, and she wakes him before dawn to watch a wild doe and her fawn staring at them through the windshield of their car. They spend a week in the library of an empty town, reading stories to each other and doing all the voices. They travel north, and east, and back south. They talk about her mother.
They don't talk about Hampnie.
And still - the worst happens, and Julie remembers the promise she asked for. He never quite made it, but that doesn't matter, because she still means what she asked. They say goodbye to each other with all the dignity left for such things in the world. Julie's daughter goes into the ground knowing he loves her. He knows she loved him.
If such peace were enough, it would not be such a messy, broken world. Julie looks unseeing past the horizon, and behind his eyelids, when he lies down to go to sleep, he crowds out images of his family with images of Hampnie Hambart, broken every way open, blasted and beaten, blotches only of blood and bone.