Cold Quiet Country (5 page)

“Did they fight? Did Burt and Gale fight?”

“Gale had his arms up and Burt was hittin’ him. Mostly pushing him, saying, ‘You get the hell off this farm, you goddamn pervert, and don’t you dare come back here again!’ He says, ‘I’ll string you up, you hear…’ and all the while pushing him and grabbing him by the shirt and dragging him from the house.”

“What did Gale say?”

“He was red in the head like the dick on a dog, and mad enough to cry. You know how boys are. And I didn’t hate him so much as feel bad for him.”

I watch her.

“Because of the way he growed up, almost never knowing where the next meal was going to come from, or who was going to try and steal it from him. That boy had to be a fighter, and it ain’t no wonder his morals was wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“Gale was an orphan. He was in the boys’ school.”

“Wrong is wrong, and everybody knows it.”

“Did you? When you was a boy?”

“Where’s Gale live?”

“I don’t know. Maybe in town, but only these last two months. He never comes here by the road. It’s always through the fields.”

“What’s he do for money?”

“Been working at the Haynes’s Meat Market. Learning the trade.”

I take her shoulders in my hands and squeeze. “I’m leaving Deputy Sager here. I want you to go inside the house. There’s going to be activity—law enforcement activity. Coroner stuff. And I got Cooper coming out with the dogs. We’ll get them kids’ scent and hunt ’em down. It’ll be better for you to wait in the house, with your mind on something else.”

I get on the radio and tell Fenny to have Deputy Roosevelt check out Haynes’s Meats. Then I come back to Fay. She’s come to the hood of the Bronco.

“Where are you going?” she says.

“Out there.” I take the red sweater from her arm and hold it like a dead baby. “To find Guinevere.”

The casket lid was open. The Haudesert family stood in the back by the door. Burt held his hands together at his crotch; Guinevere’s brothers glanced from face to face. Gwen watched in silence. Her mother stood beside Burt, and Guinevere thought it odd; perhaps
she
should stand beside him, since he’d sought her bed.

It must have been the black dresses and suits and the smell of mothballs that changed her mother’s look. Maybe the yellow lamp on the wall cutting a harsh shadow across her face. Fay turned to Gwen and held her gaze: a plain look that said nothing. Expressed no sorrow. No blame. No knowledge. But yet, something passed from mother to daughter, as if somewhere within the book of nature, or wherever it was written that men control the world, her mother had underlined a pertinent sentence and scrawled a note on the margin.

Ahead in the line, men and women filed past the coffin and offered condolences to Guinevere’s grandmother, seated to the left. The woman was squat and round, arthritic and half-blind.

Drawn by a sorrowful snort, Guinevere looked to her right, where her aunt—mother’s sister Ellen—clutched Fay’s elbows and sobbed and pulled her closer. Again Guinevere’s eyes crossed her mother’s, and they were empty. Ellen’s need of consolation was unrequited. “There, there,” her mother said. “Shhh.”

“I can’t believe I’m crying for him.”

“Shhh.”

A hand on Gwen’s lower back urged her forward. It was Burt. Cal and Jordan fell in behind her, and Gwen led them to the line.

She looked for faces she recognized. Aunts and uncles and cousins. Of those gathered, most faces were new; locals who had known her grandfather through his seventy years on the same plot of land, getting haircuts at a barbershop that had passed from father to son, the newest son there to pay his respects. The barber was a young man, meticulously groomed, and he followed Gwen with his eyes.

Guinevere glanced over her shoulder and cut out of line, circled her brothers and father and fell in beside Fay. She took her mother’s hand, much like Liz Sunday had taken hers the day before. Fay tilted her head sweetly.

“We looked for you at the service,” Aunt Ellen said to Fay. She wiped her eyes.

“We were delayed. Almost an accident on the way here. Was the service beautiful?”

“It was what I’d always hoped,” Ellen said, and pressed her fingers to her eyes.

Gwen shuffled forward. The line approached the casket. Her other aunt, matriarch-in-waiting Meredith, had joined Grandmother beside the casket. Meredith’s eyes were red and the bags below were swollen. Meredith raised her hand to hip level and wiggled her fingers at Fay, an unconvincing and almost unwelcoming welcome.

“She loved the son of a bitch,” said Ellen.

“She never believed us.”

The sisters continued as if Gwen was not near.

Aunt Ellen’s tears had stopped falling. As the women passed the casket, Ellen kept her back to it and aimed her face to the back of the parlor. Guinevere imagined Ellen looking above the mourners’ heads, as nervous speechmakers are taught to do. Gwen turned. Fay passed the wrinkled gray man in the coffin without looking and dragged her hand along the casket edge. Let her fingertips linger at the corner, as if savoring its smooth finish.

The line progressed. As her mother knelt quickly before Gwen’s seated grandmother, Gwen studied her grandfather’s face. It was the same as in her vision. The same hair and wrinkles. His eyes were closed and in her vision he’d studied the future, but it was the same face, only pasty with death make-up.

Months later, Gwen remembered her mother’s face the morning she told Gwen that her grandfather was dead. Recalled the smoothness at the edges of her mother’s mouth, the relaxed crow tracks at her eyes. Her father’s death had washed away the harshness. As if his death had tied strings to her worries and floated them away.

His death freed her.

Guinevere had known the night of her vision that her grandfather had died. Fay’s announcement merely confirmed what Gwen had intuited by having stood between her grandfather and the place he was going. That’s how she came to think of it. She’d witnessed him on his path to meet his maker.

When Gwen considered Fay’s response to his death, and illuminated her mother’s face with the light of Gwen’s own suffering at her father’s…hands…she realized the face in the vision belonged to an irredeemable man—worried, yet not contrite, looking ahead to profound suffering.

Seems the fire could blaze like the Hindenburg and not warm the rest of the house. I’ve emptied the bin beside the hearth and if there isn’t more outside I’ll end up burning the kitchen table and chairs. Moving around warms me. If I can get some wood and find food, maybe things will be okay.

The carbine is above the mantle, where I found it. Save the two holes in the ceiling and the carbon in the tube, it’s like I didn’t try to blow my head off a few minutes ago.

I spot a brass fireplace kit: shovel, broom, poker, and tongs. I thrust the poker into the fire, rest the tip on the reddest embers. For later.

Jesus still floats above the paint. His look says He’s seen it all, and whoever painted Him was an expert at capturing nuance. Whoever painted that had to have actually seen Jesus, because I’ve never seen that look on a real person.

Well, maybe one: Mister Sharps, of the Youth Home.

There’s a closet opposite the front door. On the other side of the wall is the kitchen and I’ll explore that in a minute—that and maybe first I’ll prowl about the roll-top desk for any letters that will tell me whose hospitality I’m enjoying. Firewood comes first. I take a heavy winter parka, a hat, and leather work gloves with woolen inserts from the closet. They feel so good I could sit on the sofa and sweat, if it wasn’t for fear of having no fire and nothing to burn.

The sun is high but the haze of falling snow filters the light. I circle the porch to the back of the house. Along the wall, drifts bury a few cords of firewood. I fill the bin with icy logs and limp out for another armload, and leave it on the porch, outside the door.

Inside the house I rest on the sofa and cold air from the busted window crosses my face. Drawing the curtains didn’t cut the gusts. I hunt until I find a collapsed Kenmore clothes dryer box that still has shooting targets stapled on it. The old man has a bunch of thumbtacks in the first roll-top drawer. I tack the cardboard over the window. Draw the curtains again.

My clothes lie in a steaming clump at the hearth. Corduroy soaked in blood, and flannel streaked red across the front. I don’t want them but they won’t burn wet. There’s no electricity, else I’d find that new Kenmore.

I hang the pants and shirt from different hooks on the mantle, like Christmas stockings in a Yuletide horror movie. The man who lived here had three children, from the hooks.

An orphan thinks about what it would be like to have a family, but only for so long, and then he thinks about how he prefers not having one, and if he did have one he’d tell them all to bug off because he likes solitude. But that’s a lie. What really happens is he slowly understands the world is dark. Some people are born on third base and some are born in the dugout. Orphans are dumped outside the ballpark and won’t ever get inside, unless they sneak around the fence and pretend they were there all along. You learn how to look like what you’re not. Read about families and adopt the vernacular—and when you meet a stranger you sound normal, as if you’ve spent your life battling older brothers and pulling little sisters’ pigtails.

I lived in the Youth Home in Monroe until last summer. They rented us out to farmers every harvest and used the money to feed us year around. Plus what they got from charities and philanthropists around the state. When I was nine a man named Dwight Moobender died. Though none of the boys had ever heard of him, we were happy to attend his funeral. Society people sat in the front row and forty ragamuffins cramped into the back. Moobender had left the Youth Home a Considerable Sum, a number that was never spoken aloud, but from the solemnity of the voices that uttered the words, must have been in the hundreds of trillions. Mister Sharps selected the least disheveled urchins from our group to pose with Widow Moobender, who had never borne children and looked like it was for a reason. I can’t hear of Considerable Sums without remembering her taking me by the shoulders and repositioning me in front of her for the photo, me feeling like a rabbit being adjusted by a hawk.

Mister Sharps had preached before the ceremony about how important us making a good impression was to receiving our Considerable Sum. Seeing Moobender’s pinch-faced wife, I understood. Over the following weeks we went from promises of seven course meals, Christmas presents, and warm winter clothes, to somber realities. After the funeral and the acclaim that attends philanthropists posing with starving children, Widow Moobender hired a lawyer. A judge decided Mister Moobender had been insane to leave money to orphans.

Sharps was a man in love with expediency, ramrod-stiff, but capable of flushing with empathy. Yet the two dispositions never surfaced at the same time. He kept a black paddle on the wall with eight drilled holes so the air could get out of the way—and many was the hellion who’d prayed for Mister Sharps to flush with empathy only to find him expedient with the paddle. When the Moobender money fell through, he seemed worse for it than us boys.

We boys continued to work the farms that fall. I was nine years old. I worked for a Monroe local named Schuckers but pronounced Sugars. He took five boys for two weeks of cutting corn. He had a device called a corn pole, nothing but a two-by-four that stood five feet tall from a tripod base. We’d cut cornstalks six inches from the ground with scythes and lean them against the corn pole, gradually surrounding it with a teepee of corn. When the corn shock was big enough Schuckers could barely get his arms around it, we’d tie it off with twine. He’d leave them standing in the field, and at the end of the harvest we’d stow the shocks in the barn. Later in the year he’d hire some of us back to shuck the corn and chop the stalks into hog feed.

Part of the arrangement was that he fed us while we were there, in addition to remuneration paid the Youth Home. Schuckers arrived one lunchtime carrying a metal bucket, and for five hungry boys that’d been working his fields since sunup, he’d brought ten hard-boiled eggs. We were sitting in a clump of shade by a small orchard. We’d been cutting his corn all morning and wouldn’t see food again until six that night, and the oldest boy, Murph, asked Schuckers if he couldn’t bring out a loaf of bread that we could all share.

Schuckers knocked Murph from his cross-legged seat.

“Say another damn word, you ungrateful shit!”

Every one of us leaned back.

Schuckers continued, “I’m helping you out and you gimme lip. No wonder your mothers dumped you in baskets. Each one ’em saw you’d be nothing but a bunch of whiners.”

He saw something on my face he didn’t like and towered over me with his foot reared back until I was about to tremble into pieces. “What do you think of that, Redpants?” He called me Redpants because every day I wore red corduroys that had fit me well when they were passed down to me but had shrunk since.

Schuckers kicked over the bucket of eggs. We’d only each taken one by that point. The other eggs spilled into the dirt and we ate them that way. No matter how skilled you are at taking the shell from an egg, if the shell is dirty, the egg will be, too.

Toward afternoon, my belly was a knot. All of us boys were strung along the field, thinking the same thing. Words floated back and forth about all the food inside Schuckers’ house, and the hungrier I got, the more I dreaded that one of us would be stupid enough to run inside and rob him. We kept working, and our progress took us closer and closer. I was closest.

Murph waved to me and I waved back. He waved again, underhanded, shooing me toward the house.

“He’s in the barn. Run in there and get a loaf of bread or something!”

I looked from the house to the barn.

“We deserve better’n two eggs,” Murph said.

I sprinted and stood on the porch before going inside. Breaking in was a matter of opening the screen. I hadn’t seen Schuckers go inside the barn and didn’t know how long he was likely to stay, but the longer I stood on the porch the more likely I was to get caught. I slipped inside and found my way through a narrow hallway to the kitchen. Schuckers hired us boys because he didn’t have a wife and sons to do the farm work and we were cheaper than men, so I wasn’t afraid of finding someone in the house. I listened and the only sound was a black fly that kept hitting the window.