Proud Flesh (21 page)

Doc had not taken his car but had gone with his caller, or callers, in theirs. That they might have gotten lost was impossible. For even if the driver had been a passing stranger, Doc could have been set down blindfolded on any stretch of road or on any cowpath in the county and have found his way home again. Considering the speed at which, according to Mrs. Metcalf's account, the car was being driven, they might have had an accident. None had been reported, however; nor was any wreck ever found during the succeeding days. Theirs may have been the car which was going too fast to slow down for the pile of loose cotton lying strewn across the highway out near the Renshaws' that night, and which, plowing right through, set the cotton on fire by knocking over the kerosene flare put there to warn approaching drivers. But there was no way of knowing who had done that; for unfortunately the man who owned the cotton, Hugo Mattox, although he was lying in the field alongside, and although the skid marks left by the tires on the road measured fifty yards long, had slept right through the whole commotion, waking only hours later to find his cotton charred and smoldering.

It was certainly to be feared that Doc had met with foul play. Suspicion fell naturally upon the migrant workers with whom, it being ginning season, the countryside was filled just then. As yet there were no clues. But Doc was a much-loved figure, and feelings ran high, and busy as the season was, there was a kind of floating posse, men in town with cotton at the compress, always on hand in the square.

That Friday morning a plume of smoke seen rising deep inside North Woods drew a search party in there. They found a moonshiner's pot-still, or rather, found the smoking remains of one, the explosion of whose boiler had caused its owner to decamp in haste. There were stories of certain quart Mason jars of white-mule whiskey, but no evidence of the missing Dr. Metcalf or of his abductors. Meanwhile that day passed and so did the next one without bringing the ransom note expected by many. The finding on Saturday of a Panama hat caught in the overhanging alders at a point a mile downstream from the town started a movement for having the river dredged. For the time being nothing came of it. One minute Mrs. Metcalf would declare it was her husband's hat, the next minute deny that she ever saw it before. By then she was in no state to identify anything.

There were other doctors in the town, but Metcalf's practice was the biggest by far, and at once, in addition to the concern all felt for his safety, his patients and their families began to suffer great inconvenience and hardship through his continued absence. There were women about due to give birth, and who would have no one for it but Doc—as women are about the doctor who has delivered their previous children. There were those under his care for chronic illnesses and for injuries and for postoperative treatment (few of these, for a main source of Doc's popularity had been his slowness to draw the scalpel), and in the meantime somebody else came down daily with something new, people who had doctored with Metcalf for so long they hardly knew where else to turn, like Edwina Renshaw, for example, who, as luck would have it, had been stricken on the very eve of Doc's disappearance.

Days passed and not a trace was found, not a clue. Mrs. Metcalf had taken to bed and was being attended by young Dr. Weinberg. Sheriff Benningfield would race through the square and out of town in one direction or another carrying a carload of armed deputies, and sometimes a brace of bloodhounds in the bird-dog cage in the trunk. On coming in later he would shake his head and say to those on the corner of the square awaiting their turn at the suction pipe of the gin, “Nothing definite yet, boys. We're working on it.” And the Sheriff would want to know from any who lived out the Renshaws' way the latest news of that other search for a missing man which all were also following by then.

For by then it was known to all—it was a scandal almost to make people forget the missing Dr. Metcalf—that the Renshaws had despatched two of their men to bring the missing Kyle home to his dying mother. Ballard and Lester. They had been seen and recognized—or rather, recognized though not seen, as they were driving at the usual Renshaw speed—on the road to Dallas. A mother lay on her deathbed, nine of her children at her side, but the tenth, her youngest and always her pet, him the family had not dared to trust to come if summoned by a wire but had had to send two of his brothers in person to fetch him home. It could happen in any family, and in any other would not have caused such a scandal; what made it such a scandal was the Renshaws' belief that it could happen in any family but theirs. Their mother was failing fast, according to reports, and whether Ballard and Lester would make it back with their renegade brother in time for a deathbed reunion was most doubtful. “If only old Doc was here,” people sighed and said. “He'd keep her going.”

As the days added toward a week and Doc Metcalf was given up for dead, disgust with the local officers of the law spread through the town and the surrounding countryside. News of Doc's disappearance now penetrated into the hinterlands, into those roadless reaches where lived some of the men most beholden to him. Rough men these were, with rough notions of justice; their presence in the town was a cap to the fused and waiting charge, and a mood of lynch law hung palpably upon the sultry September atmosphere.

It was just the worst time of the year for such a thing to happen. During that week all but the big-scale farmers finished gathering their crops. Their cotton picked and ginned and their bales either sold or put in storage, they came downtown to swell the number of idlers on the sidewalks of the square. It was the season when ordinarily the town was busiest, noisiest, gayest. Now, though crowded, the square was ominously quiet. The crowds were composed exclusively of narrow-eyed, tight-lipped men. Usually along with their last load of cotton they brought the family in to spend some of the money they had gotten either from the sale of it or borrowed against it from the bank while hopefully awaiting a rise in the market price; this year their wives and children had been left at home. The stores were empty, the merchants standing in their doorways with their hands in their pockets and the added seasonal salesclerks gazing out the show-windows. The abduction of Dr. Metcalf was hurting the town's entire economy. Only the barbershops and the marble-machines in the cafes and the bootleggers in the backalleys were doing any trade. Eggs, and also a beefsteak, were fried on the sidewalks in idle demonstrations of the heat. The air was seasoned with the odor of raw cotton, and along the curbs and against the store fronts cotton lint lay in dirty drifts like the last snow of spring.

As crops were gathered the migrant workers left. That Doc Metcalf's killer, or killers, might have been among those allowed to get away was a thought to make men gnash their teeth in helpless rage. Leaving town became a suspicious thing to do as the remaining number of workers dwindled and tempers meanwhile mounted, and the wise ones, the end of their jobs in sight, began to slip away unnoticed, some without even drawing their last day's pay.

Strange lawmen appeared in the town, reputed—the suspected crime being a federal offense: kidnaping—to be FBI men. The river was dredged, without result. One breathless evening a mob collected in Market Square outside the jailhouse, drawn by a rumor that a suspect in the case had been brought in for questioning. This proved unfounded and the crowd dispersed, but its size was such and its mood so unmistakably combustible that on the following day the local detachment of the National Guard sweated through a display drill on the public square. An event among the men observing these maneuvers aggravated the tension. Will Mahaffey dropped dead on the street. Will was near eighty and known to have been in poor health for years, but old Doc had kept him going, and the feeling was that Doc might have kept him going still if only he had been there to do it—another score to be settled with his kidnapers, or his killers, as the case should prove.

II

Just then occurred a new mystery.

Meeting his neighbor, Rex Bailey, on the square one morning just at sunup, Doak Westrup said, “Rex! You know my dog Speck. Well, somebody killed him last night!”

“Doak,” Rex replied, “you took those words right out of my mouth. When I went outdoors this morning I found my dog Blue with his throat slit from ear to ear!”

Rex and Doak were joined by a neighbor of theirs, John Joliffe. John looked bad. He said, “Did you ever in your life hear such a howling of dogs as went on all last night? I never got a wink of sleep. As soon as one stopped another one took up. Somebody must have died. Edwina Renshaw, do you suppose?”

Rex and Doak were telling John their news when they were joined by Dean Watson. “What? Well now, what in the hell is going on around here?” said Dean. “When I stopped at the Renshaws' this morning to ask how Mrs. Edwina was, somebody had killed two of Clifford's coon-hounds overnight.”

The men exchanged grim looks. In a place where to harm a man's dog was a shooting matter, this new mystery, although it was a distraction from the affair of the missing Dr. Metcalf, instead of cooling passions further inflamed them.

“I have turned down offers of as high as a hundred and seventy-five dollars for that dog,” said Rex. “You can believe that or not just as you choose, I'm ready to swear to it before a notary public.”

“I believe you without that,” said Frank Lovejoy. “I've shot over many a dog and some thoroughbreds among them, but never a better one than old Blue. I'd have given you a hundred and seventy-five dollars for him myself.” For what it was worth, Frank, who lived in a different direction out of town from that of the men whose dogs had been killed, offered them each a pup from his bitch Jill's next litter, provided of course that Jill whelped that many.

Rex accepted Frank's offer with thanks, but his expression made plain that while other dogs might succeed, none could ever replace old Blue.

That night again, as soon as the sun went down, every dog in the district for a radius of ten miles set up a howl, the sound passing from one farm to the next and off into the night in an unending echo. Into this lugubrious chorus presently entered the baying of Tom and Jerry Partloe, Prentiss Partloe's pair of purebred Walkers, famed among foxhunters for the beauty of their voices when on trail: a clear ringing note like a crystal bowl when the rim is struck—but now just two more hellhounds making hideous the still, moonlit night. Twice Prentiss went out to quiet them; each time they recommenced as soon as he was back inside the house. Toward midnight he had been on the verge of going out a third time when they fell quiet on their own. In the morning he had found them both dead, their throats cut.

And again that morning one of the Renshaw Negroes had found another of Clifford's coondogs dead.

The third day it was Calvin Sykes's turn. “I thought I seen somebody or something prowling around out by the woodshed by the light of the moon,” said Calvin. “Nehi was carrying on, howling and howling, and I got up to look out of the window. It was shining bright enough to read an insurance policy, and I thought I caught sight of—”

“If it'd been me I'd've taken a shot at him,” said Dean Watson.

“Next time I will too,” said Calvin.

“I get my hands on whoever done it I won't shoot him,” said Rex Bailey. “I'll do the same to him as he done to old Blue. See if I don't.”

What were they waiting for? someone wondered aloud. And like bees suddenly swarming after days of restless gathering, that incipient posse began to stir.

But before the mystery grew half an hour older news of a fresh development hit the square. Doc Metcalf had been found and brought in.

III

He was found, alive, on the road at a spot ten miles from town, fleeing on foot from his captors, suffering from exposure and hunger and exhaustion, and reduced by fear and indignation to a state bordering on nervous collapse, so that nothing could be gotten out of him except a repeated threat to “put them so far behind bars it would take a dollar to get a postcard to them.” Beyond this he was incoherent, the memory of what he had been put through making him sputter with uncontrollable resentment, and Dr. Weinberg, as soon as he had examined him, declared his condition critical, refused to let him be interrogated, and placed him under heavy sedation.

The farmer who found Doc and brought him in, Lee Fowler, had been on his way into town with his last load of cotton for the gin. It was just daybreak and Lee had the road to himself. As he rounded a bend he saw ahead of him an old white-haired man limping along with one shoe on and one foot bare, and carrying a small black bag no bigger than a woman's purse. Not until it was almost upon him did the old man hear the truck, much too late to escape being seen, yet he made a frantic, feeble attempt to hide himself among the bushes at the side of the road. Having seen that it was a white man, and thinking he might be a fugitive from the law, Lee stopped to render whatever aid and abetment he could. He got down from the cab and addressed into the leaves an offer of complicity. He was answered by a sob, and parting the branches, he found himself supporting the man, who fell into his arms. It was the missing Dr. Metcalf, but so altered that at first Lee did not know him. He was filthy and bearded and his face and hands scratched and his hair all matted and wild. He was covered with mud, the barefooted leg being caked to the waist, and his clothes in tatters. From his appearance Lee estimated that the old man had been in flight and in hiding for possibly as long as two or three days. But as to where he had been taken, by whom, and how he had managed to escape, at all this Lee could only guess, and for the time being, while they waited for Doc to regain consciousness, that was all the men on the square could do. Evidently he had been badly mistreated, according to Lee, and was in terror of recapture. As soon as he was questioned about his ordeal his head would commence to shake, his voice to choke, and his eyes to brim with hurt and angry tears. Then, the phrase having gotten lodged in his disordered mind, he would repeat his vow to “put them so far behind bars it would take a dollar to send a postcard to them.” However, if only he did not die without having named them, his abductors would be lucky if they lived to see the inside of a jail.