Evil Grows & Other Thrilling Tales (13 page)

In any case, past triumphs meant nothing to him. He lived in the present. And why not, in view of the fact that he was working on his masterpiece?

It lay across two sawhorses in the back room of the shop, a lozenge-shaped construction without a nail or a corner Or a sharp edge anywhere. The handles were solid gold, the lining deep blue satin. The crowning touch - the Fugurello family crest, a hammer in a mailed fist framed in casket shape - was assuming definition even now at the point of Umberto's chisel. It surpassed all his earlier achievements, and certainly nothing would ever rival it in the future. For this was to be his own casket.

The imminence of death hardly saddened him. He was 78 after all, and more aware than most that no one lived forever. His only regret was that he would be unable to observe the reaction to his last and greatest work when it was unveiled at his funeral. He was lamenting this necessary disappointment when the little bell mounted on the front door of the shop announced a visitor.

"Uncle Umberto?" called a familiar voice.

The old man drew a tarpaulin over the casket just as his nephew, the mortician, entered through the curtain that separated the two rooms. The visitor was tall and thin - one was tempted to say "cadaverous" - and wore his dark hair fashionably long. Recent cosmetic surgery on his nose had left him with average features dominated by icy blue eyes that matched his suit.

"Good morning, Antonio."

"Tony." Something like annoyance edged the young man's cool tone. "Tony Farrell. I had it changed, remember?"

"Who could forget?" The decision to forsake the honored family name had possibly contributed to the early demise of Antonio's father, brother of Umberto. "What brings you to my shop on a Saturday morning?"

"You mean my shop."

His uncle said nothing. That had been a great mistake, his deeding the property over to his brother's son on the occasion of his birth. Umberto had not touched wine since that night.

Antonio said, "A fellow has a right to inspect his possessions from time to time. What's this, another masterpiece?" Before Umberto could stop him he reached out and pulled-off the tarpaulin.

For a moment the beauty of the thing struck even Antonio. But he recovered himself quickly. "That's real gold in the trimming!" he complained. "What good will that do anyone when it's in the ground? What did I tell you about throwing money away on materials we don't need?"

"My money, not yours. The materials came out of my savings."

"And whose time did you spend on it? I heard you were turning down business, but I didn't believe it until now. That's the family crest on the lid. What were you going to do, enter it in some fool exhibition put on by those graveworms you call your colleagues?"

Umberto made no reply. In a twinkling, his nephew's manner went from hot to cold. "We'll talk about this later. I came down here to tell you I'm selling the shop."

"Selling!" The old man pronounced it as if it were an unfamiliar word.

"Lock, stock, and casket. I'm liquidating the inventory and putting the building and property on the open market. That includes your little project here. It should bring several thousand once we scrape off the engraving."

"We have been in this business for–"

"Too long," Antonio interrupted. "It's called moving with the times. No one does business with independents anymore. They go to the big supply houses, where they can get machine-made models for a fraction of what you charge. This is a prime location for a parking lot. Of course, that means tearing down the building, but that shouldn't cost too much. A swift kick will do it. I'll make a killing."

"And me, Antonio?"

"Tony," snapped the other.

"Will you tear me down too, or sell me along with the inventory?"

His nephew smiled - a mortician's smile, blandly obsequious. "Certainly not, Uncle. You've worked hard all your life; you've earned a rest. I've made arrangements with the Waning Years Retirement Home. You move in next week."

"But I don't want to retire!"

"What you want or don't want is not an issue. As your only living relative, I can have you declared incapable of caring for yourself and commit you to a state institution. Instead I've elected to place you in private hands. You should be grateful."

"I'll fight you! I'll hire a lawyer."

"And what will you use to pay him? You don't even own these tools - which, by the way, I have a buyer for, if you can provide a list of what you have here. If you can't, I'll just make one." He produced a pad and pencil.

"I have rights."

"Not if you're senile, and that's what I'll prove in court if you insist upon making things difficult. This is a young man's world, Uncle Umberto. If you hadn't been so busy making your pretty boxes you'd know that. Now, try to stay out of my way while I inventory this equipment." He started counting the braces and bits on the wall behind the lathe, tallying them into his pad.

Umberto glared at his nephew's back. Then his eyes fell to his masterpiece's unfinished crest, and as always when he contemplated a project, all other cares receded. He picked up the No.-5 hammer he had been using, thought better of it, exchanged it for a heavier No. 3 with a shiny Neoprine grip, and brought it down with all his might squarely into the center of Antonio's fashionable hairstyle.

The Fugurello sanity hearing is in the records for anyone who cares to review it. Following conflicting testimonies by the psychiatrists who had examined the defendant, a harried judge ruled him legally insane and unfit for trial and committed him to the state mental institution for treatment. This failed to cheer Umberto, who was depressed by his inability to attend his nephew's celebrated funeral.

The centerpiece was the talk of his profession for weeks. Under a rose-colored spot, the casket's eggshell finish threw off a high gleam that put the flowers to shame. Everyone agreed that Antonio had never looked better, and when the service was over and the top half of the lid was lowered, exposing the ornate crest, the guests were moved in spite of the solemnity of the occasion to applaud.

After eighteen months, authorities at the institution agreed that Umberto could be trusted with tools once again, and he was granted permission to do light work in the shop. These were happy days for Umberto, who had been cheered by his colleagues' letters and telegrams of congratulation upon his masterpiece; doing work he loved, he no longer thought about death or its proximity. The doctors had in fact given him a clean bill of health, which he attributed to freedom from the responsibility of earning a living.

Then came the untimely passing of the institution's director and a special request for Umberto to craft a vessel for the remains. Material posed a problem in the face of bureaucratic cutbacks, but with effort he managed to obtain some good cedar and recycled brass for the handles and fittings. Making something worthwhile out of such second-class stock was a challenge he welcomed.

He rubbed the last irregularity from the surface and stood back to survey his workmanship. The trimming glittered like gold against the deep red-brown of the wood. He frowned appreciably at his reflection in the finish. It wasn't a masterpiece, but it was still good craftsmanship, and that was something money couldn't buy.

L
ight spread gray through the sycamores, igniting billions of hanging droplets with the black trunks standing among them looking not fixed to the earth but suspended from above like stalactites. A mockingbird awoke to release its complex scan into the sopping air. There was no answer and the song was not repeated. Leaves crackled, drying.

The man was already awake, a tense silhouette against a yellowing sun louvered by vertical tree shafts, a knee on the ground, the other drawn up to his chest and one fist wrapped around a rifle with its butt planted in the moist earth. His profile was sharp, with a pointed nose like a check mark, the angle dramatized by a long stiff bill tilting down from a green cap with JOHN DEERE embossed in block letters on a patch on the front of the crown. His shirt was coarse and blue under a red and black checked jacket with darns on the elbows. His jeans had been blue but were now earth-colored, like his boots under their cake of silver clay. He had been there in that position since an hour before dawn.

From where he was crouched, the ground fell off forty-five degrees to a berry thicket that girdled the mountain. The thicket had been transplanted by his great-grandfather from a nearby bog and allowed to grow wild until it resembled the tangled barbed wire in which the great-grandfather's son would snare himself thirty years later and wait for the sun to rise and the Germans to discover him in a muddy place called Ypres. This natural barrier had trapped a number of local men the same way, to wait like the soldier and, now, like the soldier's grandson for the dawn and what the dawn would bring. The slope bristled with leafed trees and cedars and twisted jackpines, heirs to the great towering monarchs that had fallen to the timber boom of another century, whose black stumps still dotted the mountainside like rotted teeth.

A third of the way down the slope, a hundred feet below him and two hundred feet above the thicket, stood his own shack. It had been built of logs when James Monroe was president, but a later ancestor had nailed clapboard over the logs to make it resemble a proper house. A four-paned window that had been covered with oiled paper before the coming of the railroad now reflected sunlight from three panes, emphasizing the blank space where a bullet had shattered the glass.

Now, as the sun lifted, its light struck sparks off tiny fragments on his jeans. He flicked them away carefully. Before tumbling out of the shack he had made sure to remove his wristwatch and anything else that might catch light and betray him.

He knew who had fired the bullet. Inside the shack, its cracked black cover freshly nicked by that same projectile, lay a Bible as thick as a man's thigh, its cream flyleaves scribbled over in old brown ink with names of his forebears and the dates of their lives and deaths going back to 1789, when an indentured servant from Cornwall bought the book second-hand in London and recorded the birth of a son named Jotham. Four generations of names followed before the simple entry: "Eben Candler, murdered by Ezekiel Finlayson, Hawkins County, Kentucky, May 11, 1882. His will be done." Eighteen similar notations appeared on succeeding pages, in differing hands, until the survivors wearied of keeping count. The final line, "Jotham Edward Candler, born September 8, 1951," written in his father's formal script, commemorated his own birth. Finlayson losses were not included.

No one remembered the specifics of that first encounter between a Candler and a Finlayson, although it had something to do with the ownership of forty acres of bottom
 
land in Unico County. Only the casualties were remembered. Jotham's own coming of age had been marked by a daily catechism in which he was expected to recite, in what ever order asked, the names of the Candler slain, their murderers, and the dates of their deaths as they had been recorded in the big Bible; and when he was strong enough to lift a squirrel rifle, he had been taught to think of his small, furry targets not as squirrels, but as Finlaysons.

It did not matter that no one knew who held title to those forty acres—that was as gone as the bottomland itself, seized by the bank during the depression of 1893—or that the fecundity of the Candler and Finlayson women had led to considerable interbreeding between the two families during the long truces. Hatred was an inheritance as solid and treasured as the old Bible and Great Grandmother Candler's homely samplers, their red embroidery and white linen gone the same dead-skin brown on the walls of the tiny shack. Jotham, with a bachelor's degree in agriculture and three years in Vietnam behind him, was growing marijuana on plots that had supported his father's stills, and the Finlaysons had sold Ezekiel's ferrier's shop to buy a funeral home and the first of a chain of hardware stores, but aside from that little had changed. Bad blood was bad always.

As the sun cleared the mountain, its light turned leafy green coming down through the branches. Creatures stirred in the dry-shuck mattress of last year's leaves, and the last wisp of woodsmoke left the shack's chimney in a bit of shredded tissue that vanished into the thatch of fog now treetop-high as it lifted and broke apart. Jotham's assailant would know by that that he was no longer inside. The waiting was almost ended.

Jotham was the last Candler to bear that surname. His sisters were married and his only brother had died in Korea before Jotham was old enough to remember him. He would carry the name to the grave with him because of what the army's defoliants had done to his genes in Da Nang. In view of that temptation—the opportunity to wipe out by one death the long line of Candlers—young Bertram Finlayson's attempt to kill him in his sleep that morning seemed long overdue.

For he had no doubt it was Bertram.

Eight years Jotham's junior, he had been too young to serve in Vietnam, and had spent that frustration in turkey shoots across the state, winning a caseful of trophies to display under the antlered heads on the walls of his fine house in town. His arsenal was a legend among collectors of firearms and he often boasted that he had used them to kill every kind of animal that lived in the county but one. He was the only Finlayson young enough and mean enough to bother about a fight that most had thought was buried with Jotham's father.