Descent (35 page)

72

The funeral was held
on a damp and chill Thursday morning. It was only ten days since the old man had been buried here, but now the last of winter had been washed away by the rains, and the grass was coming in pale green and tender over his grave.

There had been no formal service—Sheriff Kinney had seen enough of the press and other gawkers and wanted only to get his brother laid to rest and for all of this business to be behind them, although he knew it never would be, and those who attended the burial had received a call from him the day before, when the time and day had at last been set. Among the mourners were the Gatskill girl, wearing the same black dress she’d worn ten days ago; the old veterinarian, Dale Struthers, and his wife, Evelyn; Maria Valente and her daughter, Carmen; the sheriff’s two deputies and their wives, and
Kinney’s own wife and his daughter, Josephine, who’d driven down from Boulder again and who was unable to keep her eyes from the Courtland girl, so thin and quiet in her wheelchair, so pale in her dark dress and dark hair, her eyes gazing into the distance while the pastor spoke graveside once more, committing on behalf of those gathered this soul to God’s keeping. The breeze took up his words and carried them along over the graves and into the far border of trees where the crows sat in the boughs watching.

The casket descended mechanically into the earth and a few flowers were cast down onto its black enamel hood and Denise Gatskill dropped some small unseen thing that rang lightly along the curve of the lid and fell down into the dark. Then she was led away in the care of another young woman and a young man who, like her, had nothing more to say to anyone there.

One by one the remaining mourners turned from the grave and shook the sheriff’s hand again or embraced him, and then moved on to the Courtlands and the girl in the wheelchair, the men nodding to the girl and patting her stiffly on the shoulder, the women bending to press their faces wetly to hers. They shook hands with Grant and Sean and Angela, and as there were no words for what they felt they said none and moved on, some to pay respect to other graves, the rest returning to their cars.

Kinney lacked the heart to open up the ranch house again and instead the mourners were invited to the Whistlestop Cafe, where Tom Hicks was preparing a brunch buffet, and for this reason Maria Valente and her daughter were brief with their respects, Maria saying as she held Angela’s hand that she hoped she would see her again at the cafe and then turning from Grant Courtland and his family and walking away hand in hand with her daughter. At their car the girl stopped and looked back, and Sean, holding his tie down against the wind, went to her. Maria slipped into the car, and Sean and Carmen stood talking for just a moment. Then she raised up on her toes to kiss his cheek, and he turned and came back, head down, refusing to meet his sister’s eyes or to acknowledge in any way her sly smile.

Kinney walked the old pastor to his car for the chance to press a fold of bills into his hand, but the pastor would not take the money, as he had not taken it when he’d buried the sheriff’s mother, and then the sheriff’s father, who had been members of his parish. On his way back Kinney stopped behind an iron bench and lit a cigarette, and after a moment Grant walked over to join him. Kinney shook another cigarette up from the pack and Grant looked as though he would take it but then didn’t.

“Told myself I’d quit,” he said.

“You can quit some other day.”

He took the cigarette and leaned toward the sheriff’s cupped hands, and they stood smoking, watching the small huddle of their families in their dark clothes, all standing but one.

“How’s she coming along?” said the sheriff.

“Healing fast, the doctor says.”

“I ain’t surprised.”

“I appreciate you putting this off like you did, Joe. We all do.”

Kinney waved this away.

Grant read the inscription again on Emmet and Alice’s shared stone, and he read the new stone already in place:
WILLIAM MICHAEL KINNEY, BELOVED SON AND BROTHER
.

“I don’t know how else to put it,” he said, “but I wish your dad had lived to see this.”

Kenny nodded. “I do too.”

“My last words to him weren’t very kind ones,” Grant said. “To Billy. I would like to have them back.”

Kinney blew a stream of smoke. “Mine weren’t either, Grant. He didn’t go out of his way to bring out the best in people.”

“Well,” said Grant. “I’m not likely to remember that part.”

They smoked. They watched their families, each one of whom glanced in turn to see that the men were still there behind the bench, still smoking. As the wives talked and the men looked on, Caitlin slipped her hand into the sheriff’s daughter’s hand and without looking at her simply held it.

“I guess she didn’t get to them other funerals, then,” Kinney said. “Them two girls and that other man, the hiker.”

“No. But the families came to see her at the clinic. The girls’ families.” Grant looked away and drew on the cigarette. “I’ll tell you, Joe, it reminded me of when she’d win a race, and the parents of the other girls would come over to shake her hand, hug her.”

Kinney flicked the ash from his cigarette. He peered into the gray sky.

“They ever find any family of that man?” Grant said after a moment.

“Not much. Both his folks are dead. They found his old granny in a nursing home in Sterling but she didn’t hardly know her own name so they just let her be.”

Grant stared into the distance. Then he said: “I’d have killed him if I had a chance, Joe. You know that?”

“I know it.”

“I pictured it a thousand times. Walking up to him with your dad’s shotgun, putting it in his face. I wouldn’t have cared what happened to me.”

The sheriff looked down at his boots.

“I had the TV on this morning at the motel,” Grant said. “And they were talking about a little girl nine years old got taken by some man down in, I don’t remember the name. It wasn’t too far from here.”

“Pueblo.”

“Pueblo. Yes. Little thing got away when the man’s van broke down and he took her into a 7-Eleven and she started screaming.”

“Brave little girl.”

“Yes,” Grant said. “But say that van didn’t break down, Joe?”

“Well,” said Kinney. “I guess some would say God was looking out for her.”

“Is that what you’d say?”

Kinney looked out over the stones. “Some days I would,” he said.

Grant nodded. He said, “Sometimes I wonder if I didn’t make a mistake, not seeing him for myself, that man. His body. Seeing it with my own eyes. I wake up sometimes and I know he’s not dead. That he fooled everybody and he’s out there still.”

Kinney looked at him until he looked over. “That was some other man took that little girl, Grant. I can by God guarantee it.”

“I know it, Joe. I know it. But it’s no comfort.”

At the cars Kinney leaned down so Caitlin could put her arms around him once more, and Grant lifted her from the wheelchair as he had once lifted his son, and he and Angela got her settled in the backseat of the new car with the pillows behind her and more pillows under her leg along the seat. A few days before, down in Denver, he’d traded in the blue Chevy for the wagon. He’d wanted to throw in the green Chevy too, but Sean said the car would be too crowded and that he’d follow along in the old truck.

Angela reached to embrace Kinney and he stood stooped and patting her back while his wife and daughter waited. He shook Grant’s hand and he shook Sean’s casted hand, and Sean wanted to tell him something but the sheriff raised his free hand as if to deputize him and said that everything that ought to be said about Billy had already been said. None said
good-bye
and neither did they say they’d see each other at the cafe, and the two families got into their cars and Kinney sat behind the wheel watching until the new wagon with its three riders and the old Chevy with its one had both passed under the arms of the ponderosas and turned onto the county road, and he waited a little longer still before putting his own car forward, knowing he would never see any of them again.

73

Three days later a
nd
a week sooner than he’d predicted, Dr. Wieland pronounced Caitlin fit for travel and she was discharged to the care of her family and to the postsurgery specialist who awaited her in Wisconsin. That afternoon, she and Sean left their parents in the motel as they’d left them one July morning long ago and they drove out of the city in the new car and up into the mountains, Sean at the wheel and Caitlin arranged in the backseat with her pillows. Up and up the winding pass as before to the Great Divide where the waters decided which way to go, east or west, and without stopping they looked at the families who’d pulled over and they saw children on the slope above the parking lot making snow angels in the high old snow, in the warm April sun, and they drove down again, down once more into the small resort town and everything was as she remembered it and they passed the motel where her parents and the boy had lived while they searched and while the sheriff and his people searched and the rangers and the FBI searched and the whole world searched and none of them ever more than ten miles from where she was as the crow flies and none of them ever anywhere near her for that.

The road was called Ermine, she remembered that, and they found it and followed the black swings of it up into the pines again, and at each intersection Sean stopped while Caitlin studied his old map in its four faded pieces, and he went whichever way she told him to go and they were not up there long before she had him pull over and park.

It did not look like the place to him but he killed the engine and got out and collected her crutches from the back and stood by as she wrestled herself up out of the car, and when she was up on her one foot he handed her the crutches. She took a few steps on the blacktop and stopped and lifted her face to the sun and breathed slowly.

“You get used to them,” he said.

“I know. I remember.”

“You remember?”

“I had them when I was seven.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“I do.”

“What happened?”

“Dad ran over my foot.”

“Dad ran over your foot.”

“I came running out of the house and he backed over my foot. My own stupid fault.”

“Was he drunk?”

She shrugged. “All I remember was he was leaving and he hadn’t said good-bye.”

They stood in the sun. There was the smell of the desiccated needles and of the sap weeping from the pines. Then they left the blacktop and made their way through the pines, Caitlin choosing her steps carefully and Sean following, ready to reach out but knowing he would not have to, that already she’d integrated the crutches into the thoughtless mechanics of movement, as she’d integrated the absence of one human foot and would integrate the mechanical one when it came.

They entered the glen and sat on the stone bench in the freckled light. The white and maimed Virgin stood as before amid the white trunks of the aspens and the chalky headstones. There was the weird sense of being back in time, at the beginning, a sense of knowing what was coming. Everything in the glen had an arranged, artificial look to it, like staging—even the light, even themselves. She was winded and as she caught her breath he leaned to look
for the plaque, expecting it to be covered in growth as in his dream, but it wasn’t.

She saw him reading the plaque and turned to read it herself.

Right Reverend Tobias J. Fife,

Bishop of Denver, Mercifully Grants,

In the Lord, Forty Days of Grace

For Visiting the Shrine of the Woods

And Praying before It,

1938.

The little aspen leaves stirred and they felt the breeze, brief and cool.

“Go ahead if you want to,” she said.

“Go ahead and what?”

“Eat your Snickers.” She smiled and he tried to smile back.

He dug the cigarettes from his pocket and got one into his lips and lit it and blew the smoke away from her. They were quiet. He looked once at her bandaged stump where it lay atop the opposite ankle, the way anyone would sit. After a minute he said, “The old man we were staying with, the sheriff’s father?”

“Emmet.”

“Emmet. He told me this story one time about his great-grandfather busting up his son’s foot, Emmet’s grandfather’s foot, with a hatchet, the blunt end, when he was just a boy. To keep him from going off to war and getting himself killed like his brothers. He’d been the last boy left.”

“Did it work?”

“I don’t know. Emmet found out later that his grandfather made the whole thing up. I still don’t know what to believe. Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed it.”

She sat looking at the face of the Virgin.

“When you were little,” she said, “I’d hear you through the wall at night, talking. I’d come into your room and sit by your bed and you’d go on talking, as if you knew I was there. As if your eyes were open. I’d ask you things and you would answer. You’d say the most hilarious things.”

“Like what.”

“I don’t remember. I just remember wanting to laugh so badly I thought I’d pee myself.” She looked at him, her eyes bright.

“I don’t remember that,” he said.

“You never did, the next morning. But you knew, when you were sleeping, that it was me. You’d say my name.”

They were silent. Sean smoked. He looked at her bandages again and she saw him looking and elevated the stump a little.

“It doesn’t hurt,” she said. “Not much. It just kind of pulses. And itches.”

“The stitches,” he said, remembering his own.

“No. My foot. The bottom of it. And my toes. I swear I’m wiggling my toes and I look down and there’s nothing there. And still I swear I’m wiggling them. Like they’re invisible. Like there’s some kind of hole in my vision.”

He thought about that. Then he said, “Why didn’t you bring it?”

“Bring what?”

“You know what.”

She looked down at the stump. “I don’t know. I could have. I thought I would. But when I saw it sitting on that floor, in that place, I didn’t want it anymore. It wasn’t a part of me anymore. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

He drew deeply on his cigarette and blew the smoke.

“I saw him,” he said.

“Saw who.”

“That man.”

She turned away.

“When he hit me with the car, I saw him,” he said. “I saw his eyes. I tried to tell you but I was so—Jesus, Caitlin I was just so . . .” She put her hand over his fingers and squeezed. And when she did this he was a boy again, and she was eighteen, up there in that mountain hollow while their parents waited below at the motel, and everything that had happened did not have to happen but could be altered by some simple act, by some slightest change in the unfolding of the day, and there would be no man in yellow sunglasses and there would be no crushed knee, no months and years of pain and no raped girl in an alley and no Emmet and no Billy and no girl on a horse nor girl on a ledge and no shack and no chain and no ax either, and they would come back down the mountain together and Caitlin would go on to college and she would run and the world would not miss it, the world would not care if these two young people slipped away and lived that other life instead.

She squeezed his fingers and there was no sound in the glen but their own breaths. At last she released his fingers and picked up her crutches and began to haul herself up, only to abruptly sit down again.

“I’m so weak I can’t fucking stand it,” she said.

“Just sit,” he said. “Just rest.”

“No. I want to go now. But I need a favor, Dudley.”

He turned and she looked at him.

He hooked one arm under her knees and the other around her ribs and he lifted her from the bench and she was so light this girl, this stolen sister, this king’s daughter sacrificed for what offense and to appease what god or gods he didn’t know, and he swung her around so her back was to the statue and the headstones, and when they were under way she said with her arm around his neck, “You think they’ll still give me that track scholarship?” and he said, “Maybe.” And then he said, “Maybe half,” and she laughed, and she weighed nothing as he carried her back down the trail, careful of her head, careful of her invisible foot, back to the car.