The Third Hill North of Town (10 page)

“Oh, no,” she said. “My dress is
ruined!
I’ll never get this stain out.”

The cut on her forearm was superficial, but it had bled quite a bit. Both Jon and Elijah gasped in horror when they saw the large red splotch on her sleeve.

“You’re hurt,” Elijah said, surprised. He temporarily forgot the direness of their situation as he leaned over the seat for a closer look. “Why didn’t you say something?”

Jon’s head appeared next to Elijah’s. “Do you need a doctor?” he asked. “How bad is it?”

Julianna was touched by their almost parental concern for her. But before she could thank them for their solicitousness, her forgotten years as an English teacher resurfaced, and her big green eyes flickered with amusement.

“ ‘I bleed, sir,’ ” she quoted. “‘But not killed.’ ”

Elijah frowned, not understanding, but Jon stared at her, taken aback.

“
Macbeth
?” he asked.

Her smile widened as she shook her head. “Nope.
Othello.
Iago says it at the end of the play. Good guess, though.”

He studied her with curiosity, wondering more than ever who she was, and what she was doing here. “You know Shakespeare?”

She giggled. “Not personally, silly.”

Her little girl voice was back, and the adult woman had vanished.

Jon stared at her for another long minute, then began to bump his forehead against the front seat over and over. “Great,” he muttered, between bumps. “Oh, yeah. This is just
terrific.
”

The heat in the car was stifling; all three of them were dripping with sweat.

Elijah clasped his arms around his naked stomach to keep from vomiting. “What are we gonna do?”

Julianna peered out the windows, then gestured over the stone fence at the dairy. “Do you suppose the Millers are at home? I bet they might give us some lemonade, if we ask nicely.”

Interlude

 

P
awnee, Missouri, (population 137) was little more than a village wedged between steep, brooding hills, nine miles south of the Iowa border. Named after the Pawnee Indians—who’d been sent packing to a reservation in Oklahoma in the 1870s—the town was home to mostly Irish and Scottish immigrant farmers and their offspring. There was only one street to speak of, but it was a busy one. There was a smithy, a general goods store, a school, a doctor’s office, and a post office; there was even a telephone/telegraph office and a bakery (
Nellie and Eunice’s Sweet Home Kitchen
). Northern Missouri in the summer was as hot as a boiler room in hell, and in the winter it was bone-numbingly cold. Yet it wasn’t a bad place to grow up, especially if it was all a child had ever known.

As was the case with Julianna Larson.

Julianna was fifteen years old that summer, and had never been farther than twenty miles from Pawnee. Her father, Eben Larson, was the county tax collector, and her mother, Emma, was Pawnee’s postmistress and sole telephone operator. Julianna’s two older brothers, Michael and Seth, still lived at home and took care of the family farm; Eben had ceded the place to his sons after a hay conditioner shredded his left foot and permanently crippled him. The Larson farm was a mile and a half north of Pawnee, and their nearest neighbor was Clyde Rayburn, whose beat-to-hell old farmhouse was several hundred yards closer to town, hidden from sight by a high hill and a row of maple trees.

If somebody had told Julianna she’d be fleeing Pawnee in three days and wouldn’t attempt to return for the next thirty-nine years, she would have thought the idea preposterous. She loved her family and friends, and even though her world was gradually getting larger—Pawnee’s school was for kids in the eighth grade or younger, so the past year she’d ridden her horse to Hatfield, five miles distant, to attend high school—she was still content with her life, and had no idea what kind of hell awaited her in the coming week.

It all started with a large, angry farmer named Rufus Tarwater.

In spite of Prohibition, Rufus was a drunk, and everybody knew it. Worse than that, he was a mean drunk, who was said to enjoy waling on his wife, Josephine, whenever he felt she was getting “uppity.” His farm was on good land and should have provided everything he needed, but Rufus was rumored to spend all his earnings on moonshine, so he and Jo were always strapped. The only reason they survived at all was because the minister of the Lone Rock church was a soft touch, who could always be counted on to tide the Tarwaters over with food from his very own pantry whenever Rufus came begging.

Julianna’s dad, Eben, was new to the tax-collection business; the accident with the hay conditioner had just occurred the previous autumn. After his injury, the only job in the area he was still up to was tax collector, because it allowed him to stay off his bad foot most of the day. This meant, of course, that every taxpayer in the county came to call on Eben Larson in his home office at least once a year, and usually more often than that.

Which is why Rufus Tarwater, taxpayer, came calling on a Saturday morning in June.

Rufus was in his mid-forties, and therefore old enough to remember a time when no taxes had been imposed on his farm at all. It rankled him beyond reason to be forced to visit the tax collector every three months and make a payment of twenty-seven dollars; in his mind, that money belonged to Rufus Tarwater, and no one else. Twenty-seven dollars was worth a lot of moonshine, and he hated handing cash over to the government on demand—especially to a snooty little pencil pusher like Eben Larson.

Rufus didn’t know Eben well at all, but he didn’t have to be overly acquainted to take his measure. Eben was said to be a brilliant man, who’d taught himself to read Greek and could do complicated math in his head, and Rufus believed that anybody who engaged in that kind of uppity horseshit was nothing but a cocky son of a bitch who thought he was better than people like Rufus.

In truth, Eben
did
look down his nose at Rufus, but not for the reasons Rufus thought. Eben didn’t mind that Rufus wasn’t educated, but he minded a great deal that he got drunk and beat his wife. Eben adored his own wife, Emma, and thought that any man who could hit a woman—especially a woman he’d vowed to love, honor, and cherish—was nothing but a scoundrel and a coward.

Eben’s early life had not been easy. His father passed away before he was born and his mother died giving him birth, so he was taken in by an elderly couple named Charles and Lily Lamb. Charles Lamb perished shortly after Eben moved in with them, and Lily remarried a man named Zachariah Pittman, who only made it to Eben’s fifth birthday before having a fatal heart attack of his very own. Lily died of grief a year later, and Eben was forced to spend the rest of his childhood in an orphanage.

But his life as a grown man had been altogether different, and blessed. He had a loving wife and three beautiful children; he and his sons had escaped the Great War by virtue of being both too old and too young, respectively; he had a fine intellect (that his daughter, Julianna, had inherited); and even though his foot had been mauled, he counted himself lucky to be alive, and never complained once about the chronic pain that came with the injury.

Rufus Tarwater, of course, knew none of this about Eben Larson, but even if he had, it wouldn’t have changed what he thought of him. To be honest, Rufus didn’t much care for anybody else but Rufus Tarwater.

He learned this attitude at the knee of his father, Tilson. Tilson Tarwater fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy, and was one of those unhappy men who survived the carnage of the war but came home still spoiling for a fight. Tilson had four boys—Rufus was the youngest—and he raised them to hate everyone and everything, including each other. Rufus’s mom, Eleanor—a quiet, grim-faced woman from Kentucky—disappeared one day when Rufus was still in diapers, and never came back. Hence Rufus grew up thinking the only way to survive in the world was to be a better fighter than anybody else, and this philosophy was supported by the daunting physical size and strength he attained as an adult, which allowed him to dominate and intimidate almost everybody he encountered.

Rufus was a mountain of a man. He wasn’t exceptionally tall—only six foot two—but he weighed 350 pounds, and most of that was muscle. When he was a little boy, though, he had a rough go of it with his older siblings, and endured years of cruelty and abuse at their hands. This all ended, however, when he outgrew his tormentors; the first thing he did once he came into his own was to break his brother Frank’s jaw and collarbone with a crowbar, and chase the other two boys from the house. Tilson didn’t escape his youngest son’s wrath, either; Rufus believed his dad was owed payback, as well, and came damn near to killing him one day when Tilson made the mistake of backhanding Rufus for mouthing off at the supper table.

Regardless, the Tarwater farm eventually came into Rufus’s sole possession. Tilson left no will when he died (strangely enough, he went peacefully, in his sleep, with a sweet smile on his battle-scarred face), and since Rufus had driven his brothers clean out of the state by then and the law had no way of tracking them down, the family farm passed to him by default. Rufus felt no guilt about this; in his view, he’d fought for the place and he’d won, fair and square, and if his brothers were stupid enough to come back home and try to get their share, he’d have been more than happy to give each of them a six-foot plot of land in the cow pasture, and a pinewood box for a house.

Anyway, prior to that Saturday in June, Eben and Rufus had only met twice to do tax business, as Eben had been the county collector for such a short time. Neither meeting had been a pleasant affair; it would be difficult to imagine two souls less alike, and each man loathed the other on general principle.

The second meeting had been particularly confrontational. Rufus had been unable to make his payment, and so had consented—with no intention of doing any such thing—to pay double the next time. Yet when Eben forced him to sign an agreement to this effect, Rufus’s temper ignited. He flung the signed contract at Eben, knocked over a card table, and stormed from the premises, muttering threats.

And the following morning Eben’s beloved dachshund, Cerberus, was found dead on the road, his neck snapped.

Eben couldn’t prove this vile act was Rufus’s doing, but he was sure of it. He shared his suspicion with Emma and the boys, but he forbade them to speak about it with Julianna, instructing them to say instead that Cerberus, whom Julianna had adored, had been accidentally run over by a car. By doing this, Eben was not trying to coddle his daughter with a prettified version of events; far from it. Indeed, his only concern was keeping her alive, were she to discover the truth.

Julianna was a sensitive, loving girl, but when she was provoked she also had what Eben called “an Old Testament temper,” and nothing in the world set her off more than cruelty to an animal or a small child.

When she was eight, for instance, she had come across Sully Nixson, a teenaged boy, tormenting a tomcat behind the school, and she had picked up a stick and flown at Sully with a Sodom-annihilating fury that was worthy of Jehovah Himself. Sully Nixson was amused by this attack at first, but his laughter abruptly ended when he fell to the ground with a grape-sized knot over his right ear. Lars the blacksmith saw the finale of the skirmish, and had called Julianna by the nickname of “Amazon” ever since.

But Rufus Tarwater was a far, far cry from Sully Nixson, and Eben was terrified of Julianna finding out what had really happened to poor old Cerberus. If she were to go after Rufus like she’d gone after Sully, it could well be the last thing she’d ever do. Rufus would have no compunction about killing someone who dared attack him, even if that person were a young girl.

And especially if he thought she was guilty of being “uppity.”

Julianna had been in school both times before when Rufus visited, but she was home on this occasion, washing dishes in the kitchen. Emma was working at the post office and the boys were in the fields, so Eben and Julianna were alone when Rufus banged on the front door.

Eben’s office was right next to the entryway, and before Julianna could respond to the knock she heard her father’s uneven footsteps as he clumped his way to the door:
taTUNK, taTUNK, taTUNK.
He had been crippled for months, but it still saddened her to know he would never again walk without limping.

“Hello, Rufus.”

The living room and a swinging door separated Julianna from the men, but she could hear Eben’s words with no difficulty. His voice was courteous, but much colder than usual.

Julianna frowned while drying the dishes. She knew Rufus, of course, and she didn’t care for him. She’d heard all the gossip about how mean-spirited he was, and she’d often seen his wife, Josephine, walking around town with multiple bruises and cuts on her face. What was most damning, though, was that her father clearly disliked the man. Julianna needed no other reason than this to dislike him, too.

Rufus ignored Eben’s greeting. “I got no money for taxes, Larson.”

There wasn’t a trace of civility in his manner, and Julianna felt her spine stiffen.

Eben cleared his throat. “You said that the last time, too, Rufus.”

The vexation in his tone was plain; Julianna could tell her father thought Rufus was lying. But he sounded nervous, as well, and it shocked her to realize her father feared the other man. There was a long pause, and she could picture the two of them standing in the doorway, glaring at each other.

Eben Larson was as tall as Rufus, but nowhere near as muscular. He was a beanpole (as were all his children), and though he was strong from years of farm work, he was frail in comparison to Rufus. Rufus, in spite of his drinking, was easily the most powerful man in the county. Julianna herself had once seen him lift a quarter-ton calf in his arms as if it weighed no more than a parakeet.

Eben finally broke the silence. “Well, don’t just stand there. Come in and we’ll discuss your options.”

Rufus didn’t seem to care for this suggestion.

“There ain’t nothin’ to talk about,” he snapped. “If I ain’t got any money, the government can’t take any, right?” A porch board creaked under his weight. “It’s my money, anyway, goddammit.”

“Nobody likes paying taxes, Rufus,” Eben shot back. “But if you don’t pay them, you’ll be arrested. I’ll have no choice but to report you to the sheriff.”

Rufus’s voice dropped, and Julianna strained to hear what he said next.

“You ain’t gonna say nothin’ to nobody,” he rumbled. There was a tense pause. “Not ’less you wanna lose another dog, that is.”

Julianna clutched at the sink as the blood left her face.

As shocking as this ugly revelation was, she nonetheless understood intuitively, now, why her father had sounded fearful a few moments ago. He wasn’t afraid for himself; he was worried for her. He had no doubt assumed she was listening, and was apprehensive about the possibility of Rufus making just such a terrible comment in her hearing. She was also wise enough to grasp why her whole family had chosen to deceive her about the dog’s death three months ago.

They knew her too well.

She had loved the little dachshund with her whole heart. Ever since he was a puppy and she was a little girl, Cerberus had slept with her each night in her room at the top of the stairs. Had she been told right away what Rufus had done to him, there was no question what her reaction would have been: She would have gone after Rufus Tarwater with a meat cleaver. She would have torn his foul, evil eyes right out of his stinking sockets with her bare fingers. Her family knew this, and had tried to protect her.