South of Shiloh (43 page)

64

RANE STOOD IN PLACE, LEANING ON THE RIFLE.
With his good left eye, he watched Beeman hunkered down, one hand on the woman’s shoulder, talking, heads close. She huddled, knees drawn up, pillowing her head on her elbows. The day rushed in Rane’s ears; locomotives of pain, shock, and adrenaline. Still, he noticed the white gloves had disappeared. Then Beeman pushed to his feet with difficulty and trudged up the hill, carrying the haversack that contained the Nikon.

“You look like shit,” Rane said when the ragged Southern cop stopped next to him, left arm hanging limp, blood all down the left side of his back, more dribbling on his chin. “She okay?” Rane asked.

“Real shook. Was fighting for her life up there.”

They staggered up the hill and stood over Mitchell Lee’s gray-clad body that was torn and dirty and bearded. Sprawled on his back, both hands drawn up to his bloody chest, fingers arched like claws; he could have been a Confederate corpse photographed by Matthew Brady in a muddy trench at Petersburg.

Beeman turned and called out, “He ain’t going to bother you no more, Miss Kirby.” He sagged with the effort, fought for balance. Rane steadied him. Ellender Kirby raised her head, nodded, slumped back down on her elbows.

“What’d she say?” Rane asked finally, nodding toward the Kirby woman, who now had recovered enough to be talking on her cell phone.

“Says he snatched her this morning.”

“What about the black guy nobody could get past?”

“Went to town. She was alone.”

“Uh-huh.”

Beeman toed the body. “Looks like he was gonna settle up with everybody right here.”

“With a muzzleloader?”

Beeman grimaced. “She says he had a pistol. Saw him shoot those two then he turned it on her. They struggled and she got away…” After a moment, Beeman said with some difficulty breathing, “So how’s it gonna be, John?”

Rane swept his good eye along the field. Wondered, what they said down there? Not my business. Let it go. You just have to live through this thing. You don’t have to own it. So he turned, spit a bloody wad of saliva, and smiled at Beeman. “What about her? What’d she see?”

“She’s in shock, was out of it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well?” Beeman asked.

Rane weighed it briefly, then said, “Looks like you got him. Hell of a shot, considering.”

Beeman smiled slowly in acknowledgment and nodded. Then they gently helped each other remove their torn jackets and used the first-aid kit in Beeman’s pouch to bandage their wounds. The ragged hole in Beeman’s shoulder blade had bone splinters in it and he was coughing up blood. “How bad,” Beeman wheezed.

“No exit I can see. From the angle I think it’s lodged under the scapula. Some bubble action. You might have bone splinters in a lung. Sucking chest ain’t good,” Rane said as he taped a plastic bandage wrapper tight over the wound, and after that Beeman was breathing a little better.

Then Beeman saw to the plowed muscles across Rane’s chest and shoulder, which looked like shivering red rubber bands, like when you tear apart a golf ball.

Rane cast around with his good eye and asked another of those rhetorical questions: “So the Kirby woman, she another confidential informant like Marcy?”

Beeman ignored the question, preoccupied with dabbing blood, gingerly working with a square of gauze over Rane’s right eye. Then he lurched back with a wincing appraisal. “Stuff on your face is minor but I don’t know about this eye? The way the eyebrow’s torn and hanging down and the eyeball all exposed under it, I can’t tell. We got to get you to the hospital.” With great deliberation, Beeman took his radio off his belt, tore away the clip-on mike, switched it on, and keyed the push to talk. “This is Beeman.” He coughed pink froth.

“Jesus, Beeman, we copy. Where you been?” a voice came back. “He’s here. We found his truck. Looks like he’s been living in it…”

“He’s here, all right. Start an ambu. I got three down, two wounded, and one real shook up woman. North of the picnic area across 22, west of the Old Cavalry Road. One’s a pretty bad eye wound. And I ain’t breathing so hot. Copy?”

“We copy. On the way.”

Beeman let the radio drop to the ground. “Won’t be long,” he said. “They ain’t that far.” Weaving unsteadily, they continued to stare at each other.

Beeman raised the haversack with the camera in his right hand. He inclined his head at the Sharps Rane held in a death grip in his left hand. When they heard the sirens wailing on the other side of the trees, Beeman said, “Might be a good idea to trade.”

Rane looked down the slope in the direction of the two bodies sprawled in the trees, then at the Kirby woman, head down on her knees. He parted his lips and spoke through red-stained teeth. “You figure out a way to make it come out right?”

“Never know for sure, will we, John?” Beeman said, laboring to breathe.

Rane thought a moment, then said, “Sometimes the chips fall where they been carefully placed.”

“You just let me do the talking,” Beeman said.

They could see the red-and-blue flashers through the trees, so they exchanged the camera bag and the rifle and Rane extracted the Nikon left-handed. Then he nudged Beeman in a shuffle around the corpse until he liked the light, and said, “Kind of let the Sharps hang in your good hand.”

Rane staggered back and raised the camera with his left hand to his left eye with his fingers splayed awkwardly around the lens, one finger feeling for the shutter. Just before he tripped the button, he mumbled from old habit, “Pretend I’m not here.”

Then he slung the camera and asked Beeman to borrow his cell. He walked off a few feet, made his call, and returned as Beeman gagged and coughed blood. Rane helped him to the ground, which was how the Hardin County deputies and the EMTs found them, sitting next to Mitchell Lee’s body, propped up, leaning against each other.

“See to the woman,” Beeman told the medics just before he collapsed.

A THOUSAND MILES DUE NORTH, AT THE BRADLEY CIRCLE OF LIFE
Center off Highway 36 on the outskirts of Stillwater, Minnesota, Jenny Edin was greeting the last of the guests filing in for the service when her cell phone vibrated in her small clutch purse. She excused herself and opened the phone.

Mississippi prefix. Beeman’s number. A text message.

IT’S OVER. ALL OK
.

Think about that later.

She turned off the phone, returned it to the purse, and raised her fingers to her heart, to the brooch that closed the loosely crocheted, knee-length black cotton sweater she wore over a black linen dress. Then she turned back to the guests, smiled warmly, and extended both hands to Tom Dalton and Davey Manning, who stood at the front of a delegation from the reenactors.

After everyone took their seats, the Reverend Brit Etszold raised his hand as a summons to Molly Edin to step forward, with Miss Vanni, to commence the service.

Molly squeezed her mother’s hand and stood up in her black recital dress and walked with her chin lifted and her body erect toward the grand piano positioned next to an easel surrounded by flower arrangements. Mom had placed on the easel a large, three-by-five-foot, photo enlargement of a picture Molly had never seen before this morning: Dad running, smiling, behind her as she pumped her two-wheeler in the foreground.

Molly walked past the photo, took her seat on the piano bench, composed herself, nodded to Miss Vanni beside her, and together, counting under their breath, they placed their fingers softly on the keys.

65

LATE AUGUST IN THE QUETICO PROVINCIAL PARK
lake country is changeable, but the weather tends toward cool this season. So the mosquitoes and deer flies haven’t been that bad on the four-day paddle. They’ve been living on trout and walleye to stretch the grub, because Rane has packed bare minimums into the one canoe, so it could carry a passenger in a pocket of gear in front of the aft thwart. It’s a point-to-point speed trip, not a pleasure excursion. They’re traveling light. With Jenny and Molly changing off in the bow, they pushed hard up through Tuck and McIntyre and Conmee and now they’re hiking the rugged eight-hundred-rod portage into Poobah.

Sweat drips from John Rane’s deeply tanned face. He wears shorts and a T-shirt. His muddy hiking boots crunch pine needles and gravel as he totes the eighteen-foot Grumman aluminum canoe on his shoulders. He carries a full Duluth pack on his back. This is the last leg of the rocky trail into Poobah Lake.

A lot has happened in the last five months.

He has had two surgeries on his right eye and one arthroscopic procedure on his right shoulder. After months of intense therapy, most of the strength has returned to his right arm but he may never get all the fine muscle control back in his fingers. The prognosis for the eye is better. Most of the damage was confined to the soft tissue and bone around the socket, and only a few tiny shards of brass penetrated the eyeball. Full recovery will require another year of eye exercises and possibly another minor operation.

He has been on extended sick leave, plans to take the buyout offered by the
Pioneer Press
’s new owners, and is discussing a book idea about Civil War reenactors with his publisher, but not urgently.

Finally, he clears the pines, arrives at the lake, lowers the heavy canoe off his shoulders, and sets it down on the granite shore. Then he wiggles out of the pack straps and stretches. He wears a black patch over his right eye to protect it from bright sunlight, his hair is longer, and a close-cropped piratical beard circles his mouth to disguise the scarring on his chin and cheek.

He lifts the patch, shades his eyes with his hand, and, for a moment, he peruses the remote wilderness retreat that will be Paul Edin’s grave. Then he clears an area to set up the pup tent in which Jenny and Molly will spend the night. Once he’s swept a sandy area free of debris, he quickly assembles the tent, stakes it down, and then repairs a fire circle left here by other campers. He gathers a supply of firewood from the abundant dead fall in the area and stacks it next to the fire pit. Lastly, he strings a rope over a high branch a hundred yards from the tent and ties off the food bag so they can hoist it after the evening meal.

His arms are deeply tanned from the last two weeks spent reroofing the dilapidated 1870s three-bedroom house Jenny Edin bought on Stillwater’s North Hill after she sold the place in Croix Ridge. Next year Molly will walk to school.

Rane’s relationship with the Edin women is evolving and he and Molly frequently find themselves side by side on the piano bench. Jenny has prepared a list of tasks to be accomplished in the new house, which resembles a mini Labors of Hercules: after the roof, there is the wiring and the plumbing and tearing out the floors, a couple of walls, and the old furnace. Rane keeps showing up with tools and his uncle Mike and she keeps letting him in. Jenny has never questioned the official story out of Mississippi about the shoot-out at Shiloh; just as Rane has never questioned that Paul is Molly’s father.

Maybe someday.

For five months, he and Jenny have circled each other with elaborate reserve and have not so much as shaken hands. What their eyes do is a different story. Jenny insists that putting off this canoe trip until Rane’s arm was strong enough to paddle and portage was Molly’s idea. But he suspects she played a coaching role.

The campsite now complete, Rane kneels on the shore, cups his hand and dips it into the clear water, raises it, and drinks. This is one of the few places in the world where humans can still do this.

Then he turns and walks back up the portage toward the small puddle of a lake that serves as a rest stop in the long overland hike between Poobah and Conmee. For the last four days, he’s slept like a guard dog by the fire in front of the tent. Tonight he’ll camp alone. In the morning, Jenny and Molly will paddle out into Poobah and scatter the ashes that Molly carries in her backpack.

Halfway up the portage, he meets Jenny bent under the weight of the other Duluth pack.

Eyes lowered, he and Jenny exchange a curt smile and pass without a word. Molly has grown almost two inches and is lean and tan in Levi’s cutoffs. As she swings by, she sweeps out her hand and their palms slap together in a low five.

Rane sticks his right hand in his pocket and squeezes the buckeye nut Beeman gave him when they released him from the hospital in Corinth and just before the Alcorn deputy named Del drove him to the Memphis airport. His Jeep is still down there, parked in Beeman’s backyard. Beeman e-mailed that the Sharps rifle has been released by the Hardin County Sheriff’s Office and now waits, oiled and spotlessly free of rust, in his den.

John Rane continues walking to his solitary campsite in no particular hurry. He has not brought a camera on the trip.

IN MISSISSIPPI, THE AUGUST HEAT DRAPES A GRAY HAZE OVER
Kirby Creek. Kenny Beeman is pretty much healed up. He’s agreed to sub for a friend on his day off, taking a deputy shift in neighboring Tishomingo County. He enjoys the break in pace, patrolling in a one-man car, away from his desk duties as chief deputy. Today is slow, so he varies his pattern: drives into Alcorn County and onto the Kirby property.

He hasn’t been here since the week after the Shiloh shooting, when he attended, in a wheelchair, Hiram Kirby’s funeral. True to his promise to Rane, he finessed the shooting incident during a testy hour-long meeting with the Hardin County prosecutor. Beeman had patiently but stubbornly explained from his hospital bed that he was acting on a last-minute tip from a confidential informant about Mitchell Lee Nickels. Proceeding to intercept Nickels, Beeman related, he lost his security detail in the bad terrain and developed radio problems. It was at this point that photographer John Rane produced a packet of live rounds for the rusty rifle he was carrying. Discovering that Mitchell Lee had already killed Dwayne Leets and Jimmy Beal, Beeman used the only weapon at his disposal to defend himself, the photographer, and Ellender Kirby, when they came under fire. The prosecutor tested the political climate, which was running heavy in Beeman’s favor, and did not pursue the shooting; the informant’s identity was never revealed and the shooting was ruled justified.

The saga of Mitchell Lee will fuel the border country gossip for years to come and includes an alleged plot to murder Kenny Beeman and Ellender Kirby. The scheme went awry and apparently precipitated a psychotic episode, during which Mitchell Lee attacked his girlfriend, Marcy Leets, killed his coconspirators, kidnapped his wife, and lured Beeman into an ambush. In the end, it was tied in a neat forensic knot when the rounds recovered from Beeman’s back, Dwayne Leets’s chest, and the bullet sent by the Ohio reenactor all matched the Enfield rifle Mitchell Lee was carrying at the time of his death.

The Hardin County investigation determined that the bullets that killed Jimmy Beal, and contributed to Dwayne Leets’s death, came from the .36 caliber Colt Navy revolver found near the bodies. Ellender Kirby confirmed in direct testimony that Nickels used the pistol to kill Beal, administer a coup de grace to Dwayne Leets and then turned the weapon on her, a fate she narrowly escaped. Nickels’s fingerprints were found on the pistol.

Finally, the Mississippi State Crime Lab identified the bloody thumbprint left at the scene of the attack on Mary Leets as belonging to Mitchell Lee Nickels.

LaSalle Ector recovered from his Iraq wounds enough to attend nursing school. Marcy and Darl Leets have been seen more together in public, usually at their boys’ sporting events. Margie Beeman is wearing her wedding ring again.

The photo John Rane took at Shiloh ran full front page in the
Daily Corinthian
and a hundred other papers. People think that picture will get Beeman elected sheriff. Billie Watts, sober and regularly back in church, has offered to raise money for the campaign.

Beeman eases the Tishomingo cruiser past the house and the monument, and the tires crunch on scattered branches as he parks in the shade of old magnolias. A storm came through this morning and knocked down some trees, so he looks around, assessing the wind damage. Down the other side of the hill, the lakeshore is being staked and measured. He can just see a group of surveyors talking with a man in a white hard hat, who holds a roll of blueprints. Soon they’ll break ground for the Robert Kirby Memorial Research Center.

He leans over, picks up his mike, and calls in to dispatch. “T-sixteen out of the car.”

Then he gets out of the cruiser, walks across the lawn, descends the slope, steps over the fence, and approaches the old Confederate burial trench. When he gets to the trench, he removes his cap and looks around. Up at the hill, he sees Ellender Kirby come out, stand next to the monument, and raise one hand to shield the sun. Her face is flushed and round, and she carries the baby high in her belly.

Beyond the necessary questions, they have never spoken about the tense minutes at Shiloh and probably never will. She waves to him and he waves back. Then he stoops and clears several ripped branches that have blown into the grave plot. He leaves one of them, heavy with magnolia blossoms, and then pats the warm red earth.

Up on the hill, Ellie Kirby watches Beeman pay his respects. She knows his great-great-grandfather was listed among the missing, that day long ago, at Kirby Creek.

Then Beeman stands up, replaces his cap, climbs the slope, returns to the Crown Vic, picks up the mike, and calls in. “T-sixteen, back in the car.” The dispatcher tells him there is a semi wrecked out on 72, west of the Alcorn line. Beeman keys the mike. “T-sixteen direct,” he says. Then he puts the car in gear and drives away. He doesn’t turn on his flashers and really hit the gas until he’s off the Kirby land.