Behind the Bonehouse (32 page)

We all walked around and looked at horses. We sat by the pond, near the bonfire Alan'd built that we lit just before dark. We told stories of our families from long ago, when they came to Kentucky from the east and the south, and why we feel the way we do about the land we live on.

Alan never talks much at a party. We can talk to each other for hours on end, but we both like conversations with one person, or two or three, not big groups at once (small talk having been repellent to both us from infanthood on).

But tonight was different. These people saved us. And Alan talked to everyone for a long time, singly and in groups, laughing and grilling and handing out food, as though the reprieve he'd been given had opened a floodgate of wanting to show how much he appreciated the ones who'd had enough faith in him to stand against public opinion in the towns we love where it counts.

Anyway, it was humbling. It was an honoring of the hope they'd given us when we'd thought we'd live lives as outcasts, condemned to the fringes, gossiped about and mistrusted, forced to build impenetrable shells to protect us from human hatred.

As I sit here and write this down, not being able not to, with Alan snoring quietly on his side of the bed ten feet across the room, I feel as though nothing else that will ever happen could be as painful as what we've gone through.

I know that's not true. And it's frightening to even think it. Like it's tempting fate in a dangerous way. But I have such a sense of relief, I want to sit here and wallow in it while I still can.

Of course, the phone rang a second after I wrote that, and I answered before it woke Alan.

Butch, naturally. Telling us this time that he won't let Alan get away with it. He'll make us pay for what Alan did in ways we can't imagine.

How pathetic is that? Losing his wife and his children, wasn't that enough? I mean why can't he put his life back together? I don't wish him ill. Not like I did Carl through all this (which probably did me more harm than it clearly could've done him). No, I really wish Butch could stop drinking and do something useful. He fell prey to
Carl
. And whatever Korea did to him, which Alan thinks must've been significant from what he could tell when he worked with him.

The call was unsettling, though. It's not that I can see him doing anything dangerous, but it was a different kind of call. A threat this time. Unspecified. When before it was mostly gloating.

Monday, June 22nd, 1964

Butch Morgan woke up in the chair in the family room when the phone rang. He didn't make any move to answer it, but he pulled himself up, and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and laid his head in his hands. His mouth was dry and his eyes burned and his hand shook when he reached to turn off the lamp.

When he'd gone to the bathroom and made coffee and put on his work boots, he walked into the backyard where he'd built a mound of dirt the year before so he could shoot in the backyard. There was a sawhorse in front of it, where he'd set beer cans and bottles, and an old tree trunk post beside it where he sometimes nailed paper targets.

He'd nailed one up the day before, two days after he'd gotten fired from the gas station in Lexington, when he'd seen the picture in the paper.

Alan Munro was grinning at his wife, his arm around her shoulders, wearing a suit and looking smug, like he'd gotten away with murder.

Butch smiled as he walked toward the photo. He'd put thirty rounds in it the night before, and he stood and considered his handiwork while he finished his mug of coffee.

He thought about adding a belt of bourbon to the next cup, but he told himself to wait till later. There was work to be done that only he could do. Work that would right a collection of wrongs. And he'd have to wait to celebrate until the deed was done.

Jo spent that morning at the farmhouse she was redesigning south toward Shaker Town on a bluff above the Kentucky River.

The floor plan had been accepted by the owners, and she met with the general contractor who'd be doing the carpentry and bringing in the subs.

They talked about the moldings that had to be copied inside and out, and the best way to hide the heating ducts and electrical outlets, and who they should use to mill the lumber.

It was at a stage she really enjoyed, and she was whistling to herself when she got home. She chatted with Becky, who'd come to watch Ross, and then gave her rhubarb from Toss's garden, and a bag of lettuces too.

She worked in her office between the dining room and the kitchen while Ross took his afternoon nap and she finished the laundry.

It'd started raining by four thirty, and was pelting down hard, blowing in from the west by a quarter to five—which was when the phone rang for the first time all day.

She was changing Ross' pants, but she got to it by the sixth or seventh ring, and heard a faint breathless labored sort of voice that identified itself as Stoker Randolph, her neighbor from down the road.

Stoker was ninety-three, and he owned close to two thousand acres there on McCowans Ferry. His fine old farmhouse was three houses north of hers, but he owned the back strip of woods and fields behind the houses between them where he'd always let her ride.

He still farmed, driving his ancient tractor. Mending fence, usually without help, though he was stooped now and almost skeletal, and he moved so slowly and tentatively Jo often marveled that she'd never seen him fall. He was tall and sinewy and had the sun-toughened tan of a hardworking farmer. He was notoriously tough in every kind of transaction, and a determined lifelong bachelor. An introvert who liked being solitary. Who spoke gently and quietly. A man who'd shown her mother great kindness, and Jo as well, once her mother and brother had died.

Jo took him pies sometimes, and bread, when she baked it. And they talked horses, and breeding, and the price of hay. And when Jo heard how weak he sounded, her blood started pounding in her ears.

“I'm real sick, Jo. Pneumonia. Fell a good long while ago … just now crawled to the phone.”

“I'll be right there. Stay right where you are!”

She was in her truck in less than a minute, with Ross sleeping in a basket carrier beside her on the bench seat. The rain was so heavy she could hardly see the road, but she'd still parked by Stoker's front door within a couple of minutes.

It was locked. And she didn't want to knock and make him try to get to her. So she ran around through pounding rain to the porch door in back.

She rushed through into the kitchen—and saw a very surprised Stoker Randolph eating vegetable soup at a round pine table in the center of an old brick floor.

“Josie!” Stoker looked astonished. His wrinkled mouth had dropped open, and he was staring at her with his spoon in midair, his sunken old cheeks peppered with stubble, his faded blue eyes on hers.

“You didn't call me?”

“No, ma'am. Not that I'm not pleased to see y'all.” He looked a little embarrassed then, and ate the soup off his spoon.

She told him about the call. And they both pondered who could've done it and why. They chatted then for a minute about Alan's release, and the way Stoker's wheat was shaping up.

Jo left, pulling the hood of her raincoat over her head, an unsettling flash of fear twisting her insides as she slammed the truck door behind her.

She couldn't stop thinking about the call Carl had placed to Alan to get him out where he wanted him, and then she thought about Butch, as she started the pickup and pulled back out onto McCowan's Ferry Road.

The rain was blinding and her windshield wipers weren't keeping up, and yet she could see that headlights had come up close behind her once she was on the road.

Too close. Way too close on her tail. And she began to wonder what that could mean, as she put on her turn signal and slowed to turn right into her own drive.

Then the car was there beside her, pulling straight in front of her, forcing her off the road on the right.

She kept from hitting the big stone pillar at the opening of the drive, but she scraped the right fender of the other car as it pulled in front of her, and she hit her head against something hard.

Ross's basket had slid across the seat into the passenger door, and Ross was screaming, and she was trying to scoot over and pick Ross up—when her door was wrenched open.

Butch Morgan was filling the doorway, holding a gun at her head.

“Out. Get the kid.”

“Butch—”

“OUT! NOW!”

Jo grabbed the basket and the diaper bag, and Butch backed away from the driver's door enough for her to climb out.

“Put the kid in the backseat of my car.”

“He's scared, and he's gonna cry if—”

“NOW!”

Jo did, trying to think. Too stunned to see what else she could do.

“You're gonna drive. If you don't do EXACTLY as I tell you, I'll kill you and the kid. The kid first. So you can watch.”

“Butch—”

“Shutup!” Butch was on the passenger's side of the bench seat in his old sedan. And he smelled of cold sweat and old booze and he looked half out of his mind.

Jo put it in gear, feet on the clutch and the brake, blood trickling down her forehead from a cut up close to her hairline, as he told her to drive north to Versailles, then take 33 south.

Ross cried all the way into town. Butch told her to shut him up, and she tried just by talking, and though he quieted down for a minute or two, he started crying again. When they got to Rose Hill and turned south onto Main, right where Main became Rt. 33, Ross sobbed even louder and pushed himself up in his bassinette. It fell on the floor against the front seat and he screamed till he sounded like he'd choke, and Butch told her to pull off. He grabbed the bassinette and got it back on the seat, and shook Ross by the shoulders, the pistol still in his hand.

Jo said, “That'll make him cry more. Let me calm him down!”

“Shutup and do what I tell you,
if
you want him to live.”

The rain was still torrential, and Jo could hardly see the twists in the old pot-holed road, though Ross eventually began to calm down, and seemed finally to doze as they climbed one low hill after another, and rolled through the valleys in between.

Fifteen minutes turned to thirty, and they still weren't where they were going. And then, when 33 dead-ended into 68, Butch told her to turn right, still heading south on the road that led to Shaker Town.

Jo could hear Butch breathing, in the quiet times when he wasn't blaming Alan for what was wrong with his life. Jo learned the hard way not to argue with him. To listen, and drive, and try to figure out how Butch saw what had happened.

She struggled to see through the fogged-up windshield, with blowing rain beyond, and tried not to do or say anything at all that would set Butch off, praying she'd have some idea sometime of how to cope with whatever it was Butch was planning to do.

His silence carried as much weight as the hate. And driving took real concentration. Jo didn't even recognize the house she was restoring as they passed below it, with the quiet then, and her own fear, stretching on ahead.

By the time they'd been on 68 for twenty minutes, they crossed the Kentucky River on an old stone bridge, where the river was bound on both sides by high rock cliffs. A jagged wall of rock rose straight in front of them as soon as they'd crossed, turning Rt. 68 to the left.

The rain was beginning to slacken, and Butch told her to slow down and look for an abandoned roadhouse down the incline on their left where the ground fell to the river.

Jo saw what looked like an abandoned boat house, covered with vines, the roof line sagging, then nothing else for a quarter of a mile.

The remains of an old painted sign, dangling lopsidedly between two posts up close to the road, was suddenly caught in their headlights, maybe fifty feet up ahead. Then she saw the outline of a building behind it down the slope, a long collapsing rectangle, the dark rotting wooden frame listing off to the left.

“Stop!” Butch had his window open and he was peering out ahead, when he took a bottle out of his pocket and shoved a pill in his mouth. “Couple a feet more, and you angle down a drive just past the roadhouse. It's real steep and muddy, and there's a pull off to the right. Pull in there and turn around and park behind the building.”

It was hard to see what she was doing, but Jo eased the car past the crumbling roadhouse and parked in what had been a gravel patch behind its right end.

Butch grabbed the key out of the ignition, and walked around the car heading toward Jo, who was trying to reach over the seat and get Ross and his bassinette.

“Out.” Butch had pulled the driver's door open and was holding the revolver up against her head.

“I'm getting out as fast as I can.” Jo eased out from behind the wheel, then opened the back door with her back to Butch.

Ross had fallen asleep from exhaustion, but when Jo pulled the bassinette toward her, he woke up and cried. It was misting by then, not pouring, and Jo picked Ross up and held him under her raincoat, then put the diaper bag in the soft sided bassinette, and turned and faced Butch.

“Up the hill. Toward the road. Into the trees with your back to the bridge. Get movin' now!” He was standing behind her, off to one side, with the gun aimed at her back, motioning toward a tangle of underbrush and close-grown trees.

“I don't see any path.”

“There. Between the bushes.” He shoved her into a thicket of shrubs.

And she asked him where they were going.

“If you want the kid to get there, keep your mouth shut!”

It was hard going, carrying Ross and the basket, shoving her way through the brambles and branches on that stretch of incline—the hill climbing hard on her right, the river down below her on the left—and she fell hard on her knees once, but she didn't drop Ross, or say the words she wanted to shout at Butch.