Cold Quiet Country (2 page)

Maybe that’s why forced retirement feels like they cinched my balls in a leather strap and trussed me from a tree limb.

Haudesert’s lane crosses a built-up section of wooded swamp formed where a crick’s been backed up thirty years. Heavy rain came November—late—and ice sheets half the drive. I track slow on the snow. I’d planned to put on the tire chains today, but to hell with it.

The two-story farmhouse stands on a bare knoll like a broke-down castle keep atop a hill. A little farther and to the right is the barn where I’m betting Burt Haudesert breathed his last. The farm looks clean, but dreary. The air is so thick with snow that everything is gray, and the pall extends to the wood-smoke taste of the air.

It’s been a long time since the town of Bittersmith saw a murder.

The Bronco slips and I downshift, ease along at an idle. Off the ice now, the rutted lane scrambles my guts. I stop on the slope to the barn door and pull the emergency brake. Let the engine run.

Fay Haudesert rushes from the house. “He took Gwen!”

I look inside the barn. Burt’s boots point to the roof. I can’t see the rest of him.

“Guinevere’s gone!” Reaching me, she says, “Didn’t anyone else come with you?”

“Who?”

Tears stream down her wind-chapped face. “You’ve got to find Gwen!”

“Did you see what happened?”

“It’s plain.”

“He’s plain dead, but did you see it?”

“He’s got the fork in his neck.” She stands in the shelter of the Bronco and cups a hand over one eye. Snowflakes melt on the windshield as she looks across the field. Beyond is a band of forested hillside, and beyond that, the lake.

An eddy brings the taste of gasoline exhaust to my mouth.

“There was tracks that way, before it started blowing,” she says.

“They’re still there. I see ’em.” I look at the purple storm clouds and then at the pair of prints headed across the field. Nodding back at the barn, I say, “You see who did this?”

“Who could it be but Gail G’Wain? Our hired hand.”

“We’ll see.” I step inside the barn for a quick look and my stomach tumbles. Burt wears green corduroy and flannel, like he came out the house in a hurry. I imagine the scowl masking his face matches the one that fetched him without a coat. The pitchfork through his neck is narrow and Burt’s neck is half as wide as his hips. Wider’n his head. Two tines go all the way through, the middle one piercing his voice box. His fingers are curled into fists, and blood is splotched all over the barn bay—not just the puddle where he bled out, but across the floor, on the joists, bales of hay, on the workbench. It’s like a kid pumped a five-gallon bucket of red paint through a squirt gun. The drops are frozen.

Above him, off to the side, a truss hangs from a hemp rope. It’s a two-by-four with thirty-penny nails pounded into the end for hanging deer. It swings in the breeze as each gust of wind sweeps through the bay door.

I wipe my eyes. They’re wet from the cold. Fay Haudesert doesn’t see, and I paint my face detached and solemn and turn to her.

“Where’s your boys? Where’s Cal and Jordan?”

“They ain’t been around all morning.” She turns her eyes to her husband. “But he’s dead, and my little girl’s out in that.”

I look outside. The sky is mad as hell.

Lord, I’m in trouble.

The blood in my boot is frozen and ice stiffens my corduroy pant leg. The lake ice is thick enough to support a truck but I think about being warm, and how I’d hate to drop through a thin spot and drown.

Snow falls and a good headwind keeps it in my eyes. It’s been two, three miles, limping. I’ve got no coat and my calf is bare from where I cut away the corduroy. My skin is numb. My lungs burn. Ahead, a gray house sits at the lake edge, framed in the dusky storm. I’m in the middle of the lake and everything is flat to where trees border in the distance, and looking from my bloody boot to the far-off swirl of snow and trees gives me vertigo.

I turn. No one on my trail. Yet.

There’s no way this ends good.

It’s been less than an hour since Guinevere was in my arms. Struggling, maybe. Eyes wide. There is something strange and fascinating about her hearing music when people are about to die. What she called the bullfrog notes. She heard the song for both of her grandparents years ago, and once for a man about to suffer a heart attack at the grocery.

While we fondled in the loft, did she hear music for me?

Is that why?

Each step is agony. My tracks are clean. The bleeding stopped when my blood became ice, but inside the muscles are chopped. The house draws near, as if it approaches me.

The house.

Falling snow obscures a drifted slope at the lake’s edge. The wind has sheathed its fangs; snow falls straight down, like rain. I press my arm to my stomach and there’s frozen blood there, too. I blow my nose without plugging either side. Six hours ago I was inside her and warm and smelling her sweet breath and hair. Hearing telltale giggles. Too-loud giggles.

I near the bank and look things over. An inlet feeds from a draw in the woods off to the left; the streambed is evident under the drifts. The ice is thin at the edge. The first indication is a cracking sound and then there’s a decrease in the ice’s rigidity. Ten feet from the bank, I shatter through, slash forward, run on a sheet that plunges and slips, and I’m submerged and gagging…

It doesn’t feel bad. The cold shock imposes a comfortable void between my thoughts and me. My leg doesn’t hurt, though I’m walking on the lake bottom, chin barely above water, eyes peeled back and dancing freaked-out crazy-cold and maybe I’ll stay. How long would it take to end? Two minutes? Thirty seconds? But I never stop moving. I rake snow and icicles, claw out on the bank, and the air is warm.

The two-story house looms, looking like thirty-year-old bird shit and absolutely still. The windows are dark. The chimney is a monument of cold stones.

I fight up the bank. Climb the steps. Hear my teeth chatter, but don’t feel them. The door is locked and the knob sticks to my hand. I jerk away and leave a film of skin frozen to the brass. There’s a rock on the porch, a doorstop. I cradle it between my palms and heave it through a window.

The glass is jagged. I push the doormat with my boot until it folds and then lift it, mash it against the standing shards. I duck through belly down, slip to the floor and huddle. Crawl as if drawing deeper into a cave. Darkness resolves into a fireplace, chairs, a sofa. The smell is damp ashes. I’m about to freeze to death.

If I get warm, the bleeding in my leg will resume. If I bandage my wound and survive the morning, men with guns will descend on this house.

I spot a box of matches on the hearth and slide the sleeve open. Matchsticks tumble in a pile. With inflexible fingers, I scrape one across the stone. It flares, and others beside it ignite. I cup my hands above. The color on my skin is red like Gwen’s hair and freckles.

* * *

I met Gwen in the summer. She had a faraway, shattered look. A quick smile that said she knew more than her age entitled, said her flirting wasn’t a tease but a promise of goods for the taking. I watched the dust at my feet. When you walk everywhere, you see your feet a lot. Hungry and unfed for two days—except what I scrounged from the forests and fields at night—I came upon the Haudesert farm knowing only that I smelled cow dung and saw fields of waist-high corn, and others of alfalfa.

Guinevere answered the door. Her eyes were startling and her hair was as red as mine. I didn’t try to feel anything toward her, but in that very first moment I knew she had a pathway into me, if she wanted it. I didn’t want to be her deliverer. Didn’t even know she needed delivering. I saw her thoughtfulness and mistook it for empathy. In hindsight, she was edgy like a cat watching a caged bird. Her eyes flared and then narrowed. She was aware of biology and what it clamors for between men and women, and more so. Was eager to experiment with me. Perform.

That should have been my warning.

“Burt’s in the barn,” she said.

“Burt one of your brothers?”

“My father.”

On the short walk to the barn I puzzled over her calling her father by his Christian name.

I found Burt Haudesert hammering steel around an anvil. He was dressed in a green flannel shirt and corduroys. Everything was one shade of green or another save his boots; the dust covering them caught a splash of sunlight that left them almost gold. I came alongside and he explained what he was doing without me asking: re-fabricating a busted hay wagon support that he’d asked Carl somebody to weld back together—Carl being a person who could weld but couldn’t shape.

“I’m Gale G’Wain, and I’m looking for work.”

“I’m Burt Haudesert, and I got work all around me.” He studied my eyes, my clothes, my hands. “An unplanned labor shortage on account of Cal bein’ so goddamn dense. There’s tree stumps in that pasture with a higher IQ.”

“Yes sir,” I said, and stepped away.

“Stoned as a rock star, he gets up on that crossbeam and tries to walk it with a shovel for balance. Busted half the bones in his body.”

“That’s something else, sir.”

“You go inside the house, and if you ask Gwen real nice, she won’t bite your head off,” he said. “She’ll scare you up something to eat.”

I shook his hand and he winked at me and laughed. He read me right; I was grateful. But the feeling I got at his mention of Gwen should have sounded alarm bells in my head. His ease-making euphemisms about his baby girl. The tropes he put into play with a stranger. And if not that, if not him, the feeling I got as my mind followed through on those lascivious wanderings, as if Burt Haudesert had just granted permission to strip his daughter naked and enjoy her any vulgar way I wanted to—assured that she wouldn’t bite my head off.

That should have been enough, but it wasn’t.

I hadn’t eaten anything but bitter, half-grown apples, two-inch carrots, and tiny shoots of corn ears since Mister Sharps cut me loose from the Youth Home, saying I was a precocious young man and the world would reward a boy of my bent. It was that time of year when summer isn’t sure if it wants to come out and play but spring is sure it doesn’t want to leave. Crops were growing slow and all the talk in the barbershops and seed stores was on the drought. How the almanac said it was this year for sure, and the best thing to do with seeds was to save them or grind them into flour, but don’t plant them, because anything that grows will bake dry before it gets six inches off the ground. Farmers can be a superstitious lot but their bellies force them to be pragmatists, so they spend their idle minutes framing every sort of omen in every shade of light, casting gloomy predictions of their own demise, and when the luxury of idle time disappears, they set about breaking their backs to ensure no axis of foul weather or nutrient deterioration or market glut or bad health will prevent them from feeding their babies and living as free men.

Burt Haudesert struck me as being like the men in the barber shops and seed stores. He stood in the barn hammering steel, and I got that he was as much a part of the earth as a cornstalk.

Just as stiff-backed and silly.

The front door opened before my foot hit the steps. Gwen stood with her arms folded below her bosom, plumping it. She had one leg forward, her ankle to the curve of her calf showing a lot of shape. Girls are spindles until they become women and there’s nothing straight left. Gwen was a curvy country road. Red hair and freckle-faced, and freckles all the way down her arms. Her hair was up, and that made her look older. I allowed myself a good look as I came toward her and she retreated inside, still facing me, and backed against the counter.

With all the books I’d read and all the words I’d studied and all the miraculous fictions I’d imagined, the best I had for her was, “Burt says you’ll find some lunch for me.”

She studied me like she was taking the measure of a dolt and then swallowed slowly. “There’s the refrigerator.” She spun with a move that flared her dress and left the room. Thirty seconds after she was gone, her calves were still burned to my eyes.

I filled a glass with water and sat at the table with the chair sideways so I could open the refrigerator door and study what was inside. I ended up slathering a couple slabs of fresh-baked bread with butter and jam.

Burt put me to work forking compressed hay from the goat stalls. No one I knew raised goats, and I was unfamiliar with them, but the odor was just a new twist on the old rotten ammonia stink of composted urine and hay. I couldn’t shovel very much before I had to run from the stall to gulp a few breaths of clean air. The goats didn’t mind, because the smell was trapped; it was only digging a foot of hay that released its full power. I shoveled all afternoon for a belly full of food and a rip in my pants when I caught a nail sticking out of the wall.

I only had the one pair. Didn’t have the money to buy another until two weeks ago, and that from working for the butcher Haynes. The whole time I worked for Burt it was mostly for food. I saved a few dollars and he allowed me to sleep in the barn and wash in the trough.

My first evening at the Haudesert place, Burt told me to get cleaned up, because even he—reeking of the barn and unaware of it—smelled goat stalls on me. I sat to dinner with his family, his wife Fay and his boy Jordan, and Guinevere. Burt’s other son, Cal, had his supper brought to him in bed. The first month I was there I only saw him once, when Fay asked me to run him a glass of water because she was a mess with bread dough in her fingers and he was hollering for a drink.

Burt gave me a beer that night while we sat on the porch smoking stogies. He asked questions about politics. Had I done any thinking about natural rights? What did I think about the Commies taking over the country? I listened and he explained what a reasonable man would believe about the subjects. As I tried not to puke from cigar smoke and beer, Burt announced he held rank in the Wyoming Militia. His boys were old enough to have made up their minds, and each of them were joining, and that’s how I know that one way or the other when they see the way I left Burt, they’ll be on their way to find me at this house. They’re country boys with snowmobiles and friends. Heavy-artillery friends. They’ll come for me. Them and every redneck militiaman they can find.