The Followed Man (31 page)

"Shem says, and I can
remember it to this day, 'First time I ever got skunked with Heidi,
but it ain't her fault,' he says. 'Fact is, she don't have no faults
to speak of.' Shem was staring up at Blue Peak where we last heard
Heidi more'n an hour before. He took off his coat and laid it down
beside the road so's Heidi, when she got done chasing that rabbit,
would know where to wait till morn­ing, snuggled up in her
master's hunting coat. I could see Shem was worried, afraid at her
age she might have a heart attack after all that running.

"Anyway, Shem went back in
the morning, got there at first light to find Heidi laying on his
coat all right, but she wa'n't in too good shape—half her head
was blowed off and she was dead.

"Shem come by my place on
the way home, I was up milking, and helps me finish up, not saying
anything. Then he takes me out to his truck, pulls off some old
burlap bags and there's his can­vas hunting coat all brains and
blood and the little dog all wrapped up in it. 'Who do you think done
it?' he says. 'I don't know,' I says, but inside my head I'm thinking
Wallace Ellis. One thing, he lived on that same road. I'm trying to
look kind of blank, but Shem he just looks at me and says, 'So do I.'

"That gave me a chill, I'll
tell you, so I says, trying to head him off, 'Well, you'll never know
for sure, now, will you?' Shem just looks at me for a while. 'Maybe
not,' he says, but he takes a spent shotgun shell out of his pocket.
'You drop any spent shells near the truck?' he asks. 'Not that I know
of,' I says, 'though I might.' 'Twelve gauge Peters, never been
reloaded,' Shem says. In them days shotgun shells, 'cept for the
brass at the base, was made of paper, so you could tell that easy
enough. Shem looks at me. 'Don't tell nobody about this, Eph,' he
says. 'You know and I know, and the lonesome son-of-a-bitch that shot
Heidi, and that's enough.'

"You'll be wondering what
it was Wallace Ellis had against Shem Carr, that he shot his dog, and
that's a story in itself."

Eph's big hand, clasped all the
way around the white coffee mug, was shiny and rugged, the hairless
skin glazed with liver spots. Motionless except for the slight tremor
of age, the hand it­self might have been ceramic, fired and
cooled into its semitrans-lucent tan and rose. He'd taken off his
visored cotton painter's cap when he came into the tent, and put it
on his knee when he sat down; his bald dome was so much whiter than
his face it looked like brown-grained marble above his faded gray
eyes in their red lids. He still had his own yellow teeth, some of
them, though they pushed out at awkward angles to his lips. Tillie
Cole, twenty years younger than Eph, was at sixty neat, bony, softly
immaculate of skin, and her eyes still seemed to recognize an irony
and response that Eph in his age had outgrown.

Eph paused to listen to the rain
on the tent. "Still coming down pretty good," he said.
"Might as well give up and come back Mon­day forenoon."

"Eph," Tillie said.
"Tell us what happened to Wallace Ellis."

"Man was worthless anyway,"
Eph said. "And I never said noth­ing happened to him."

"The Ford V-8," Tillie
said.

"That was some little
truck," Eph said. "Eighty-five horsepower, go nearly ninety
on the flats, which was where Shem and Wallace Ellis first got
started. The old High Road to Leah, 'fore they wid­ened it and
took the thank-you-ma'ams out of it, had this mile-long straightaway
where all the young bucks used to see how fast their jalopies would
go. Wallace Ellis was a sheriff's deputy, part time, had a Indian
Chief motorcycle, and he fancied himself a motorcycle cop. That
Indian was quite a machine, too—four cyl­inders set
two-by-two upright in a block about as big as half a orange crate.
Heavy machine, but once it got wound up it would go. Chain drive,
air-cooled, had a little bitty windshield to keep the June bugs out
of Wallace Ellis's eyes. Anyway, one time Shem was coming back from
Leah and Wallace Ellis followed him on into Cascom, stopped him by
the Grange Hall and accused him of speeding, told him next time he
caught him going straight out like that he'd issue him a summons. I
guess Shem responded with something you might call fairly
inappropriate, and that was the beginning of the bad blood between
the two of them.

"I guess it was far enough
from the war, and what with the state of the country and all, Shem
having been a hero had ceased to cut much ice. Seemed like ancient
history to most. Shem had long been used to having people treat him
with a little more respect, though he never asked for no special
treatment. I guess he'd just got used to it.

"Well, knowing Shem you got
to realize it was Wallace Ellis's manners offended him most, also the
looks of the man. Wallace Ellis was bigger than Shem, for one thing,
and he was one of your natural bullies. Most big men, and I speak
from experience in the matter, don't have to go through life pushing
people aside, humil­iating, proving something all the time. Lord
knows, people was cautious enough about Wallace Ellis. Nobody went
out of their way to get his attention. Don't know what it was about
the man made him so ill-mannered. I won't go into details, but one
thing led to another and Wallace Ellis pulled his gun and there was
all manner of bad feelings and Shem had to go to court in Northlee,
it was haying season and he lost a good drying day too, and pay a
fine of seven dollars and fifty cents, which was a small fortune in
them days. Shem was angry, as you might well expect, so he got the
idea to challenge Wallace Ellis to put on the gloves with him. Put a
note up in the Town Hall—that was the old frame building that
burnt down in the '58 fires. The Legion Hall, which at that time was
in the former Christian Science Church, had a boxing ring in the
basement. At the time I says to Shem, 'Lord, Wallace Ellis weighs
forty pounds more than you and he's ten years younger'n you. What do
you expect to prove?' 'I ain't going to
prove
nothing,' Shem
says. 'I'm going to take seven dollars and fifty cents out of his God
damn hide.'

"Now, the only boxing
gloves they had at the Legion, they must have been left over from the
Dempsey-Willard fight. They was so small and light you could have
done your milking with them gloves on. You could have picked up a
ten-cent piece off the ce­ment sidewalk in them gloves.

"As you know, Shem was a
fairly big man himself, around one-eighty, and spite of the weight
difference there wa'n't much of a reach difference amongst the two of
them. Shem had the advan­tage of having boxed some in the army,
but the betting purely had to be on Wallace Ellis, and that's the way
the betting went around Cascom and Leah. What I heard, there was more
than a hundred dollars altogether, bet on that fight.

"To make a long story
short, the evening of the fight the Legion Hall basement was packed
so full of men the ring ropes was hold­ing the crowd out, rather
than the fighters in. And as for the fight itself, it started out
terrible bad for Wallace Ellis and done nothing but get worse. When
the bell rung for the first round Shem kind of tippy-toed out to
Wallace Ellis—looked like a man about to tan­gle with a
bear. I swear I almost shut my eyes and missed the first punch, which
was Shem's left fist splitting Wallace Ellis's lip. Right off you
could tell Wallace Ellis never had the first idea there was more to
boxing than drawing your right arm back as far as it would go and
letting fly, like trying to win a cigar at one of them Fourth of July
carnival mallet dingers where you try to ring a bell. His arm wa'n't
halfway back 'fore he got stung bad. His eyes opened up so's you
could see the whites all around and the poor fellow knew he was in
for it. Shem got nicked a few times, and but­ted, and one of them
big arms now and then like somebody dropped a log on his shoulder,
but it was Wallace Ellis took the licking.

"After seven rounds young
Doc Churchill near had a fit and made them stop the fight, took
Wallace Ellis off to Northlee Hos­pital, he looked like a
accident involving raspberry preserves and barn paint. Shem never
knocked him down, said afterwards he never meant to knock him down.
Said he could if he wanted, and I believe it. Wallace Ellis fell down
once in the fifth round, slipped in his own blood it looked like, but
Shem wa'n't about to let him off the hook. Said afterwards he only
got about four dollars and twenty-five cents worth of satisfaction,
so Wallace Ellis still owed him three and a quarter. That remark was
widely quoted around Cascom and Leah and never did serve to make
Wallace Ellis any happier.

"A year or so later, toward
the beginning of rabbit season, was when Shem found Heidi with half
her head blowed off, found that Peters twelve gauge shell by the
road, which happened to be the road Wallace Ellis took to work."

Eph paused and shook his head.
"I got to believe this rain has set in for a while." He
took a sip of his coffee, which must have been cold by now, and Luke
caught a quick, sly look across the rim of the cup. "Ayuh,"
Eph said with a sigh, "I figure we ought to give up for the day,
Luke. Come back Monday forenoon and finish her up."

"Now, Eph," Tillie
said.

"Well," Eph said, "I
just figured Luke might want to hear that story about his Uncle Shem,
is all."

"Now you tell us what
happened to Wallace Ellis," Tillie said.

"Wallace Ellis? Wallace
Ellis. Where was I? Wallace Ellis. So. We got to go back to that day
in October, nineteen hundred and thirty-six, Shem and me was standing
there next to his '34 Ford flathead V-8 pickup truck, next to my barn
door. Shem put the burlap bags back over poor Heidi and I can see
we're headed for trouble. 'Shem,' I says, 'I got an idea how upset
you must be, but to my way of thinking what you got in mind ain't
worth it. And be­sides, you ain't that certain who done it.' 'I
ain't going off half-cocked, Eph,' Shem says. 'I want you to get me a
shell fired from Wallace Ellis's shotgun. I know it's a Winchester
97, hammer-pump, same as mine, cause I seen him at the Fish and Game
pic­nic trying to hit clay pigeons.'

"Well, that wa'n't hard to
manage at all, as Shem was damn well aware, cause Wallace Ellis lost
his cow that fall to TB, had to be de­stroyed, and I was
delivering him one of my milkers since he had no truck at that time,
just his Indian Chief motorcycle and a beat up '29 Chevrolet sedan
the roof needed tarring in the worst way. He wa'n't a farmer, had
somebody else do his haying, worked in Leah at the woolen mill as a
bobbin racker. 'I don't know as I ought to
get
you a shell
from Wallace Ellis's shotgun,' I says to Shem. But I did. It wa'n't
hard—spent shells was laying all over his front stoop from him
shooting at the pigeons lived in his barn across the way.

"Well, it took me a week to
deliver that cow and pick up that shell, though I could've done it
that same day. I figured a dog is just a dog, not a blood relative,
and if Shem had time to cool off some he wouldn't do nothing drastic.
Besides, that was the same time they found out Shem and Carrie's son,
Samuel, had the epi­leptic fits, so I figured he had other things
on his mind. Figured he'd simmer down after a time.

"Then toward the end of the
month Wallace Ellis had the terri­ble accident on his Indian
Chief motorcycle and killed himself— smashed his face off and
broke his neck. He always did run that thing too fast.

"Well, I always did wonder
about that accident, but then after the first excitement I kind of
never brought it up again. Then, just last fall, I come up here to
the farm to take a few things to Shem. He looked so poor he'd likely
never last the winter, and of course the house was falling in. I
asked him for the umpteenth time to come live with me and Tillie, we
got six extra rooms, but he wouldn't have none of that. So we sat in
what was left of the kitchen reminiscing about old times—his
head was still clear— things like his boxing match with Wallace
Ellis, the good times we had hunting, and Shem come right out with
it. 'It was Wallace El­lis shot Heidi,' he says. 'It was his
spent shell I found beside Heidi that morning. There must have been a
little kind of dimple on the head of the firing pin of his shotgun
you never seen on mine nor any other I looked at, and I went clear to
Concord looking at Win­chester 97 hammer-pumps, examining firing
pins with some care. Ayuh, it was his gun that fired that shell,
cause the mark on the primer was the same as on the shell you got me
from Wallace El­lis's front stoop.'

" 'Well,' I says, 'he soon
got his reward.' 'Ayuh,' Shem says. Then something got into me, I
don't know what, and I says right out, 'Shem, did you have anything
to do with that motorcycle acci­dent?' He just looked at me.
'Hell,' he says, 'you had that suspicion in the back of your head all
these years?' I guess I looked kind of funny, 'cause Shem says, 'Now,
you know they give me a hunting license in the war, Eph, and I guess
I got my limit on Huns, but just when the hell did they rescind that
license? I don't remember nothing like that.' He's pulling my leg, of
course. 'No,' he says. 'The unkindest thing to do with a poor
son-of-a-bitch like Wallace Ellis is let him live.'

"So you see, for forty
years I kind of had the notion my best friend was a murderer. There
ain't no limit to what a fellow can hold in his mind!" Eph
laughed and slapped his hands down on the table to show that his
story was over.

"Why don't you tell the
truth?" Tillie said.

Eph didn't seem to hear her at
first; his story was over. He didn't want to hear what she'd said. He
was rigid, Luke could see now, not physically but with the
carefulness of age, a brittleness that needed no surprises at all.

"Maybe he don't want to
hear the truth," Eph said, a quavery anger in his voice.