Beast of the Field (23 page)

She opened her arms.  The younger girl came to her.  "I'm so, so sorry about Tommy."  She was finally overcome by tears, and then so was Millie.  She moved to the side of the pregnant belly and squeezed the Greentree girl’s neck. 

Sterno stood, watched them.  The world seemed to stop spinning around them so they could share this sad moment.  Together the two girls became a single sad thing, wrapped tight in each other's arms.  Their sobs were quiet except for mutual apologies that came on the tiny outward seeps of air they were allowed amidst their otherwise breathless grieving.  Sterno invited himself outside, where he rolled, lighted, smoked a cigarette.  And drank. 

It had been a long time.  He was old friends with the sadness, but he had forgotten all about the grief.

31.

Jove Moreland couldn’t leave her there.  He came after her, pulled her from the cabin and carried her over his shoulder to the car.  The strength she had found earlier in her desperation was now grief, and weak
ness, and she let him take her.  He backed his old Model T at full rev through the trees and into the field, where he turned around and found the road through the driving rain. 

The hail came down on them then.  A few pieces tapped on the hood and roof of the car at first, but became a few more and a few more until a thousand thimbled fingers were clicking and clacking away at them.

"We can't stay here.  Better we get ourselves  into town.  That tornado aint gonna be long."

She nodded. 

"We got to get to that barn, Miss Flora."

The car struggled in the rain and hail, the pushing and sucking wind.  Hail popped up out of the grass.  Debris moved birdlike over the swirling crops.  Just seconds later the rain and ice gray-washed the countryside out completely. 

“Oh boy, this is going to be tight,” Jove said.  Flora looked through the rain-washed windshield to see a large truck loaded high with cut trees come up on the left side.  Jove moved his Model T to the right edge of the road, the wheels on the right side going into the mud but in the sucking wake of the truck he could not maintain his control of the car and they went off the road when the window on his side cracked and came loose in its fittings.  "Hold on—!" 

For a second she thought she saw something in the wet, washed-out wake of the truck—a horse?
A buggy?  But it was moving away from them, whatever it was, and now too far gone in the violent rain to be seen.  It could not have been Tommy, could it?  Surely Tommy would not have let her pass him by, would he?

Jove made the right turn into town and at last, the barn rose at them from the mayhem. 

"Thank yeh Lord."

He spun the wheel around in the mud and hail pellets.  The front wheels banked this way, that way, before the car stalled twenty yards from the barn.  By now the wind was something a person had to yell over to be heard.  Jove screamed something at her, pointed to the barn.  The door on his side flew open.  He slid around the front end of the car, one hand braced against the metal.  He pulled her door open, reached across for a jacket from between the seats,
draped it over her head.  Her heartbeat and breaths became her world as she was lifted from the car and carried over Jove's shoulder to the barn.  He kicked open a door, put her to her feet.  Inside, the dancing had long since stopped; some people standing by the open trapdoor in the floor that led to the cellar. 

"Are you two
crazy
?"  This was Tess Helmcamp, who held a lamb and was taking it into the cellar.  Chickens, calves, shoats and foals numbered nearly as many as the people, and were much louder.  "Get your asses in that cellar!" she yelled over the bleating and crowing.  "If you know what's good for you!"

But as they entered the barn an iron grip took hold of Flora's arm.  It was Sheriff Jake.  He pulled her over to a wall.  His presence alone was all he needed to let everyone know to leave them alone.

"Where's that boy."

She could only stare at him.

"Have you seen him or haven't you?" he said, giving her arm a little shake.  She shook her head, just barely.  Her mouth hung just barely agape.  Still she could not speak.

"Old man Aaronson said he might
of lit out on that farm road behind the barn.  Where is he going, gal?"

Her mouth was not able to move.  His face was inches from hers. His eyes searched hers, and knew before his thinking mind that only fear could be found there.  He let go of her arm.  "Well, I got to find that boy," he said, pulling his duster up to his neck, "before Abner and those boys of Jonas' get their hands on him."

He left then.  She watched him press down his hat as he tried to exit the barn.  The wind was so strong by then he could barely open the door.  He managed half his body through the door before he was pinned against the barn.  “Jake, you get your ass in here!” said Tess Helmcamp, who had hold of Flora’s arm but had stopped to holler over the wind.  Two men grabbed Sheriff Jake—one of them using his body against the door—and pulled him back inside. 

Tess Helmcamp finally led Flora to and down the stairs.  The darkness in the cellar was total.  The silence was more frightening than the storm.  There was whimpering, praying, bawling from children and animals.  There were voices spoken low and calm, to reassure.  There were other small noises that preceded the train roar of the sky, but all sound was soon swallowed up as the funnel passed them over and sucked their breath from their bodies.

*

Tommy had to take the high road.  He may see a car or two, and someone in one of those cars may be looking for him, but he had no choice:  his was the quickest route for him.  After he had passed the mayor’s house he heard a truck and turned to see a large truck loaded with scrap lumber barreling through the rain, coming up fast behind him.  Tommy had no choice but to take the buggy off the road.  It was that moment he saw the headlamps of a car coming south on the road too.  He was then thanking the gods for the lumber truck.  There was no reason whatsoever for a lumber truck to be on this road during this storm, but it was, and if that was one of the Neuwalds’ cars ahead of him, this truck was going to save his life.

The truck driver pulled his horn as it came close to him.  In front of him the car coming south was halfway off the road.  The three vehicles met at once and for a fraction of a second were aligned side by side by side.  When the truck went past it took its own little storm-within-the-storm with it.  Tommy strained against the lines with all his might to bring the horse and buggy back onto the road.  Looking behind him, he saw the dark shape of the car in a spray of water.  A Model T, but he couldn’t make whose it was for the rain.  Even if he had turned around to look, in the rain he most likely would not have seen the face looking back at him through the window.

When they reached the edge of the east woods, he came down from the buggy, pulled Sonnet by the halter.  He saw the tire tracks immediately, and knew they would have to be fresh to still be visible in the rain.  The different scenarios flashed through his mind, but the only one he knew was true, the only one he knew was a reality, was that Flora had managed a ride to the
cabin.  Perhaps that car he had passed on the road belonged to Jove Moreland, the mayor’s driver, and Flora was waiting for him in the cabin.  Certainly, this was the only reality.

"Goddamnit, Sonnet.  Will you help me or won't you?"

She wouldn't.  She was tired out now, and too scared to move another step.  He had a decision to make.  He moved to the front of the horse, rested his hands on her cheeks and his eyes on her forelock.              "I have to go, girl.  You're going to be safe here.  Even if that storm comes this way, you're going to be all right.  Do you hear me?  Do you hear me?  You will be all right, I promise."

He left without looking back at her, swatting back at branches and leaping over the newly felled trees and the deadwood logs of their grandfathers alike.  He had no thoughts, he just ran.  The cabin bounded forth to him through the rain, hail, blowing limbs and falling branches.  He could hear only his panting and the limbs of trees snapping all around him like the rifle reports of a skirmish.  Lightning flickered from the four corners of the sky, sometimes lighting his way, sometimes confusing him.  At last, he saw light shining through the cracks in the cabin wall and heard an elated laugh escape his throat.  They would hunker down under the storm, dry and warm for the other's presence.  Then, with Price in shock over the twister, they would quit this town.

“
Flora!
” he called out, loud even in the storm.  “It’s Tommy, my darling!”

Again, Tommy laughed.  It was an accident, the laugh.  It was his glee escaping him, for here was the cabin.  Here was the light from within.  Here was his life.

As he reached the cabin he called her name out one last time, to allay her fears, to fight back the storm.  To hear her name called out.

The wind helped him fling open the front door.  His eyes didn't register what he saw until the blow had cracked open his skull.  Only then, through shock and shuttering lids, did his mind show him what his eyes had already seen—in front of him shining dirty red diamonds gleaming out through holes in white cloth, and in the corner of his eye the swooping blurred shadow of the dirty butt of a rabbit gun, raised high but coming down fast.

*

When their breath returned, it was used to blow relief into the darkness of the barn cellar, haven now for a good portion of the good citizens of Price.  No one spoke.  Flora was the first to ascend the thick rungs of the ladder steps, but this was only to be stopped at the cellar ceiling, which on the flip side was also the barn floor.  Something was blocking the trap door.

"Please help me.  Someone.  Jove, please."

She heard Jove resign to his fate:  helping her in front of the entire town was a mite different than driving her around in the countryside where no one could see.  He did it anyway.  He pardoned himself as he climbed passed her.  He braced his shoulders against the wood. 
Grunted.  The town folks saw a seam of light, but only until the weight of what was on top of the cellar door pushed him back down.  Again, there was the darkness, the frightened breathing.

"Someone'll come for us," someone said.  "Anyone who's out there knows we're all in here."

"Yeah," answered someone else.  "If there's anyone who's out there."

"There is," said Flora.  "There is.  He is out there.  He will come for us."

This was awkward, as was the silence that followed.

"He will come," she said again.  Despite the hard-soled footfalls on the floorboards of the barn above them—Sheriff Jake and others coming to let them out—they all still heard the tears in her voice this time, and began to understand something about the mayor’s daughter.  "He's coming for us."  She repeated it, softly, again, again and again.  They had turned off their listening now, pulled their minds inward.  Not one of them gave the slightest thought as to whom the “he” or the "us" were of which the girl spoke.

Part III

32.

They drove as if their destination were the last good light of the last good day. Beside him Millie sat drained.  She watched the dark countryside rush by the car without comment, without expression.  Sterno began to miss the chatter.  He filled the silence with cigarettes rolled with one hand, with a flask obscuring his view of the road every now and then as he tilted it up in front of his face.  For all the silence, for all the darkness, his mind was alive with May the first.

“It happened at that fishing cabin,” he said as they crossed the county line.

A mile passed beneath them as they thought about this.

“They took him and the buggy to the road after they were done, hung him up under the buggy, set the horse on its way home.”  He was not mincing words with her because like Flora Greentree at the girls’ home, he wanted—needed—Millie angry, to fend off her other emotions.  His plan now was to take her home, then go out to that cabin—if he could find it.  Over four months had passed since Tommy was killed there, a long time; but there was always something to be found.  Like the watch and the wallet in the tree stump:  there is always something still happening where something happened.

“What about everybody’s stories?” she asked.  She was speaking without hope.  “What about what everybody said at the sheriff’s office last Saturday?  About Mr. Aaronson’s old car backfiring?”

“You heard all that?”

“I was at the window.”

He looked at her sideways, smirking, but was soon enough serious again.  “The only thing I heard of the backfire was from the mayor, Jonas Neuwald, and the sheriff.  Now, Miss Greentree swears the sheriff had nothing to do with it.  If that’s the case, then he’s telling the story as it was told to him.  I’m sure everyone in town got the same story, and they would have no reason to doubt it, coming from their mayor and their only lawman.”

Now it was her turn to think. 
Another mile gone beneath them.  “So why’d he do it, Mr. Sterno?”

It took a visit to the flask before he could muster and answer.

“Hate,” was his answer.

He let this suffice as long as it could.  “Flora was with child, we know that. 
And an Irish baby.  That’s not going to sit well with a member of the Klan.  Not to mention the betrayal and treachery—as he sees it—by his daughter.  Not to mention the sinful act—as he sees it—that got her that way.  The man had lost a fortune.  He had been humiliated by this oil company, in front of his own town.  A lot of men can't handle humiliation like a man:  they have to prove something to themselves and everyone else a thousand times over.  There's also this—he might have known or guessed his daughter knew about what happened to those two oil men, and if she knew, he's going to figure Tommy knew.  Hell, he might have even known that Tommy saw what happened to those oil men.  We'll never know."

"When I first met you, I hated your guts," Millie said.

Sterno raised an eyebrow at her.  She glanced at him, then returned her gaze to the countryside.  "The way I went running after you, my dress flapping around in the wind.  And you completely ignored us.  It was goddamn embarrassing," she said quite softly, sensitive about it still.  "I hated your Missouri guts for it."

Ah, Sterno thought, s
he does understand.  The power of humiliation, the darkness that comes from it.

"I don’t no more
though," she said.

The corners of Sterno's lips curled upward.  "'Any' more," he said.

They drove nearly a mile more before she spoke again.  “Mr. Sterno?  There’s something else I gotta tell you.” 

She told him about the night of Valentine’s Day.  She had been in the woods and saw something, men and cars.  Tommy saw it too.  If Tommy hadn’t been there, she told
him, those men would’ve found her.  Now, all these months later, she knew it was probably the mayor.  That might have been the night he killed those men from the oil company.

Millie said,
“But, Mr. Sterno?  I mean, him and Pa are old friends.”

They drew nearer to Price.  As they did, the silence in the car took on weight.  Their eyes did not languish on the road or on the passing fields any longer, but darted around the sleeping town as they passed through it, the mayor’s mansion as they passed by it, and at the black ridge of wood off the bend in the road as Sterno stopped the car in front of it.

“Right here,” he said, a finger pointing down to the ground beneath the car.  “This is where they dressed him up like an accident.”  He then pointed his finger at the jagged tree line across the field.  “Over there.  In those bootleggers' woods, that fishing cabin of theirs.  That’s where they did it.  That’s where you saw those men, right?”

Millie stared into the woods.  She had once followed her brother into those woods to spy on him and his lovey-dover, and she had done it without fear.  Since that day behind the
schoolhouse though, when Gomer Neuwald had threatened her, the woods had not been the same place to her.  Not these woods, not any woods.

“You’re going in there, aint you?”

Sterno headed back to Donnan’s hay farm.

“You ought not to,” she said. 

The farm house appeared as a tiny dim square a mile ahead of them.  It grew larger, whiter, safer as they closed the distance.  

“They can do anything they want in there.”

One light was lighted within the house—a lantern, it looked like, in the living room.

“Please, Mr. Sterno.  You’ll never find that cabin in the dark.  Why don’t you wait till tomorrow?”

They reached the twin elms.

“You’re bound to find something in there you aint looking for.”

Sterno pulled through the gate, stopped in front of the house.  "Tonight, or maybe tomorrow when you wake up," he said, "you tell your ma everything you know.  About the mayor, about Flora Greentree.  You tell her everything.  It's up to you now, partner.  This part of the case rests in your hands.  Then..."  From his shirt pocket he brought out a note pad and a little pencil.  He wrote a name and number upon the pad, a little note beneath that, tore off the sheet, handed it to her.  He also handed her a few pages of notes he had already had ready to go—tight, tiny script reaching to the four corners of three full pieces of paper.  "Take these, give them to your ma too.  Then you have her call my friend in Topeka, Bill Major.  Have her tell him everything too.  They'll take care of that mayor for you."

"You act like you aint coming back here."

"I'm not coming back here," he stated plainly.  "Not tonight.  If I do or don’t find what I'm looking for in that fishing cabin, I'm going to start back tonight, stop and send a wire on the way.  But I'll be around when we come back for him.  A couple days.  I promise you that.  Go on, now.

He added one more thing:  "Partner," he said, "you did one hell of goddamn good job on this case."

Even in the darkness of the car he could see her blush around her smile.

A broad and tall shape appeared next to the car.  Junior opened the door for Millie. She did not resist him as he pulled her from the car.  He lifted her gently to his shoulder, held her there as a mother holds a toddler.  Before disappearing into the house, he stooped down to peer into the car.  “H-y,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” Sterno said.  “Now get that girl into her bed.”