This Side of Jordan (18 page)

“Nice meeting you, too.”

“Well, so long now.”

“So long.”

Alvin swung his legs over the railing and dropped down into the yard. A breeze gusted again, sweeping up clouds of dust, forcing Alvin to cover his face as he followed Chester to the automobile. The dwarf was already there, perched up in the backseat, a long chicken feather stuck in the thinning white hair behind his ear. Back on the porch, May leaned forward, her elbows on the railing. Mr. Jerome stood side by side at the top of the stairs with Hancock, both staring west into the late sunset. Chester steered the Packard out of the yard.

 

They drove about four miles along the narrow highway to the west, riding in silence through the warm evening. Alvin sat back in the seat, one arm out the window, and daydreamed about going fishing with May.
She'd have hold of his hand, her tiny fingers entwined in his, sitting on the riverbank, maybe whistling an Irish folk tune or two. She'd be quiet and listen while he talked about working with Frenchy on his daddy's farm, riding to dances on a buckboard and home again by moonlight. He'd tell her about the consumption and she'd take him in her arms and tell him how badly she felt about his sickness, her skin milky white in the darkness under the cottonwoods, her young eyes reflecting starlight, her lips redder than—

The dwarf poked him in the back of the head. “Someone's coming after us.”

“Huh?”

Alvin twisted in the seat to get a better look as Chester checked the mirror. About a quarter mile back, an automobile, headlamps glowing bright, raced toward the Packard.

“He's driving like a rocket,” observed the dwarf. “He'll catch us in a minute.”

“Can we outrun him?” Alvin asked Chester, certain it was federal marshals the instant he saw the approaching headlights. Instead of speeding up, however, Chester slowed the Packard to less than twenty miles an hour. The other automobile roared up from behind, closing until its headlamps illuminated every strand of white hair on Rascal's head. Its horn beeped twice and Chester ran the Packard over to the side of the road. A blue Nash “400” sedan pulled up alongside, George Hancock behind the wheel. He sat there a few seconds, staring at Chester and his two traveling companions. Then he eased back on the throttle, quieting the motor.

“I know what you fellows did,” said Hancock, hands falling to his lap. His eyes met Alvin's for a moment, and moved on to the dwarf and back to Chester, fixing each as if for memory's sake. “We're not all hicks from the sticks out here.”

Chester fidgeted with the gear lever and the button at the bottom of his shirt. Alvin tried to slow his racing heart by taking measured breaths, in and out, in and out. The dwarf sat rock-still just back of his shoulder. Chester squinted his eyes and looked across at Hancock. “What's your game, mister?”

Dry stalks of corn on both sides of the road shook as a breeze gusted and dust blew up over the hoods of both cars in its draft. No one blinked.

His face to the wind, Hancock said, “I saw you and that kid there go into the Union Bank this afternoon. I saw you both come out again, one after the other a quarter of an hour past closing time. I also saw Edna Evans go around back, looking for her husband at four-thirty. I never saw anyone else. Before or after.”

Chester steeled his gaze at Hancock. “Is that so?”

The wind gusted again in the cornrows and rained dust across the windshields of both vehicles.

“I'll shoot square with you, Wells, or whatever your name is,” Hancock said. “I didn't care for you from the moment I laid eyes on you. Oh, I've been to Chicago, all right, and I've seen plenty fresh fellows of your kind, swaggering through fancy restaurants, throwing money around like Carnegie, pretending to be respectable. You might've fooled Walter, but you didn't fool me. I know what you are. I didn't say so back at Jerome's out of fear for his family's lives, but I'm saying it now because I'm not afraid of you. Not one iota. Oh, I guess you're pretty tough when you've got the upper hand on somebody who's—”

“Look here, Hancock,” Chester interrupted. “I'm afraid what we're having is a case of misapprehension.”

“You're a liar, too.”

“No, sir,” Chester replied, “Not at all, and I'll prove it to you. Let me ride with you back into Stantonsburg. We'll put everything square.”

Chester smiled at Hancock who eyed him back in return, clearly taken off guard by Chester's offer. Warily, Hancock asked, “Yeah? What about these two fellows?”

Chester shrugged. “Buddy here and the midget can drive on alone to Norman tonight. I'll worry about catching up to them once you and I've worked out our little misunderstanding.”

Hancock studied him. “The marshals'll be at Stantonsburg in half an hour. I plan on driving straight into town to take it up with them. What do you say to that?”

“I'd say that'd be swell by me. I'd like to get this baloney cleared up in a hurry.”

Chester opened the door and stepped out into the road. Only the irregular humming of twin automobile motors disturbed the quiet.

“All right, get in the car,” Hancock said, flipping open the passenger door. “And don't try pulling anything. I know a few tricks of my own.” He folded his jacket open to show a revolver in the waistband.

Chester smirked. “I'm sure you do. Just let me get my hat.” Reaching into the foot-well of the backseat beside the dwarf, he murmured to Alvin, “Forget Norman. You boys drive on through to Council Bluffs and hire us a couple rooms at the Dakota Hotel. I'll meet you there at eight in the morning.”

Then Chester snatched his hat up and crossed the road, jumping into the seat next to Hancock. He gave Alvin a wave and shouted, “Take care of my auto, kid!”

A moment later, George Hancock spun the blue Nash around in a half circle and accelerated back down the long empty road toward Stantonsburg. Alvin and the dwarf watched until the exhaust cloud spun into ether and the red taillights were swallowed up in the broadening dark.

S
IX MILES EAST OF ALLENVILLE
, an hour toward twilight, the farm boy and the dwarf found matching headstones beneath a shady oak tree in an old pioneer cemetery and sat down to watch the sunset on the prairie horizon. The plots were laid out on a mound, rising thirty feet or so above the great expanse of grass and wildflowers that led to the edges of the sky. Below the mound, down a path that wound through an old stand of white oaks and bitternut hickory and across a narrow creek bed, was a ramshackle house facing a road that ran east, perhaps even as far as the Mississippi River. The August sky was windless, stems of surrounding grass and leaves of the trees under which the dwarf and the farm boy sat were quiet in the soft roselight at the end of the day. The dwarf curled his legs under himself and leaned back against the tombstone while the farm boy stretched out his own legs through white larkspur almost to the next headstone. No one had been buried on the mound in many years and the wooden gravemarkers scattered haphazardly about the finer granite tombstones were weathered nearly blank, their testimony and witness to the dead long worn off by wind and sun.

“I, myself,” said the dwarf, “would prefer a simple grave, perhaps in my garden beneath the pear tree, there where another child might till the earth above my corpse and plant tomatoes in my belly, let my legacy be quickened fertilizer come season.” He frowned. “Of course, Auntie would never permit it. We're all to be entombed together in a great marble cenotaph overlooking the Missouri River by a grove of willows where everyone who passes by will comment on how pompous our family must have been. I've often considered an anonymous death, perhaps being run down by a train out of state somewhere, in hope of avoiding an eternity of humiliation.”

The dwarf played his fingers through the petals of purple morning glory between his knees. Sunlight, reddened by the hour, shone on the pallid skin of his face and lit his eyes as he stared directly into the sunset, smiling an unspoken thought. The farm boy had rolled over onto his belly and traced the carving on the tombstone in front of him with a forefinger, scratching flecks of dirt away with an overgrown nail, slowly marking by touch the immutable dates of birth and death.

 

O
LIVER
H
EDDISON
H
ENDRICK
BORN
J
AN
. 23 1853
DIED
J
UNE
8 1877
N
ATIVE OF
O
HIO
A
GED
24
YR'S SIX MO'S
15
DA'S

 

In this green land, his heart found peace, In God's sweet arms, his soul now sleeps.

 

The farm boy said, “It don't matter much to me at all where I go afterward. Once I'm dead, I'm dead, and I don't figure I'll be caring all that much.”

“Oh, I disagree,” replied the dwarf. “In truth, Auntie assured me long ago that as we're all signed and sealed over to the afterlife, the choices we make in the here-and-now bear directly upon how much we'll enjoy God's offerings in the Great Reward.”

“Huh?”

“Whose day our Lord saw fit to bless, receives at dusk a finer rest.”

“Well then, I guess you and me got things all twisted up, don't we?”

The farm boy stood and took a long look into the west, shading his eyes against the sun, and spat. On this mound, the long prairie grasses grew fully and wildflowers bloomed free of plow and scythe. Tall soft tails of switchgrass leaned up just slightly higher than the lanky farm boy's belt buckle. Below the mound, a soft breeze swept across the fields like the gentle swells of a sundown sea. If he looked far enough into the west, he could glimpse the painted grain silos of the farms encircling Allenville where boys like himself labored in the day's end, counting the minutes down to supper and then maybe a few hours of freedom afterward in the dark.

The dwarf got up, too, wandering across the cemetery to another plot of headstones, these ringed in ornamental wrought iron and set upon by weeds and stems of yellow goatsbeard. The gate to the plot was missing and the surrounding rail had rusted and broken in several places and the headstones themselves were fractured by intruding vegetation both crossways and up from the gravesites. Although the dates of birth and death were yet legible on the old granite, the names were gone, weathered into anonymity by sixty long seasons.

The dwarf murmured, “In daydream we recall what our hearts thought buried.”

His thin white hair glistened in the sunlight and his skin appeared almost limpid. He turned to the farm boy. “Are you much disposed toward recollection?”

Ignoring the dwarf's question, the farm boy strolled over to a wood marker stuck in the dirt within a patch of prairie rose and knelt down for a closer look.

Shielding his eyes with the back of one hand, the dwarf walked toward the western edge of the mound, parallel to the farm boy, staying within earshot for conversation sake. Just ahead, a small stone angel was posed in shawl and rose wreath atop a granite block, eyes gazing south, look of contentment carved onto a cherubic face.

Staring up at the statue, the dwarf recited another old rhyme, “When a mother dies, young forth to bring, her soul is borne on angel's wings.”

Now the farm boy came up behind him to have his own look at the stone angel. “That thing must've cost some high coin.” He circled it slowly, looking for an inscription that was absent. “Spend all that money, you'd think they'd include a name or something to let folks know who they're looking at and all.”

When he came around to the front again, the farm boy noticed the dwarf was rocking back and forth on his heels like he did when he was occupied with himself. His eyes were glassy, a half-smile of sorts on his lips, arms akimbo.

“Does she look like some person you been acquainted with?” asked the farm boy. He took another look at the stone angel. “I guess she's sort of pretty.”

The dwarf stopped rocking and coughed once. His eyes watered from the effort and he shook. After clearing his throat of the dust they had both been inhaling on a dozen back roads leading out of Nebraska, the dwarf drew a clean breath and remarked, “My mother passed away granting me life. Auntie said she suffered greatly giving birth to me, but refused to cease her struggle until I came forth. She lost consciousness an instant after I drew my first breath in this world and her valiant heart stopped before she ever saw my face. Auntie told me the midwife heard a faint flutter of wings above my dear mother's bed as she died.” The dwarf looked up at the farm boy. “Do you believe in the unseen?”

Having no answer for the dwarf's question, the farm boy shrugged and studied instead the stone angel whose expression seemed to change ever so slightly in the angle of the sun's path across the sky. In Farrington, he had witnessed a cow choke to death trying to swallow an apple whole, witnessed a hound dog get his rib cage crushed running blind under the iron wheels of a loaded hay wagon. He had seen a stroke take a traveling salesman on Uncle Henry's front porch and a heart attack steal away Grandpa Chamberlain, interrupting him at Sunday dinner with his mouth full of sweet potatoes, and how Uncle Otis's eyes twitched and his tongue lolled about when he broke his neck falling drunk off the barn on the Fourth of July in the summer of 1921. The only wings Alvin had ever heard during the dying were those belonging to his momma's chickens flapping in the yard out of doors. In his experience, when God came for you, be it quick or be it slow, it was done in silence. One moment you're here, the next you're gone. Wink of an eye. Neither was it wondrous or beautiful. Dead squirrels smelled up the woods in summer. Cows and dogs stunk, too, even worse if they weren't gotten rid of soon enough. Grandpa Chamberlain owned a particular odor in the casket he never had in life. The consumption wards at the sanitarium reeked of antiseptics and gloom. Death drew a peculiar shade down on the living, not just putting out the light, but changing the color, too, into something waxy and pale. Something ugly.

“My mother had eyes blue as the sea,” the dwarf told him. “She played the piano and sang after supper for people passing by out of doors. Auntie said she danced on the front porch in the dark before bedtime and wrote poems to everyone she knew. I'm told they were quite beautiful.”

“When I get the call,” the farm boy muttered, “I hope they nail the casket shut and not let anyone have a look-see at all. I'd like to be recollected as a living person, not some hollowed-out scarecrow in a black box.”

Now late sunlight gave the stone angel a pink hue as a cool breeze swept slowly through the grass. Insects tossed and spun in its wake. Below the cemetery, a solitary flock of sparrows sailed east across the prairie.

“Sacred is the breath of life in our lungs,” the dwarf recited, “God's precious gift by death now undone.”

The farm boy sat down in the grass beside a patch of black-eyed susan. He pulled his knees up to his chest and lowered his eyes. The dwarf walked around back of the stone angel so that the statue blocked the last rays of sunlight from the red west. Then, in the shadow of the angel, he whispered a prayer for himself and the farm boy, and waited for evening to fall.

 

Along the road to Allenville was a tourist camp in a sheltering wood of black walnut and sycamore trees. Alvin Pendergast sat on a narrow spring-cot in one of the small cabins, listening to rain and thunder in the summer dark. He had just awakened from a nap and was alone. The one-room cabin was drafty and his cotton mattress smelled moldy and worn out. Next to the camp was a roadside stand popular with motorists. Because it was a weekend, plenty of automobiles were parked out front. Alvin heard a couple of fellows slosh past through the mud singing,
“How pleasant is Saturday night when you've tried all the week to be good.”
Both were drunk.

From his cot, Alvin stared out into the dark where a gust rippled through the leafy sycamores. Water leaked into a corner of the cabin, dripping steadily into a pot they had borrowed from a family traveling to the Badlands. Dampness clouded his lungs. Alvin grabbed his shoes from beside the iron cot and put them on. He felt rheumy and vaguely depressed. The dwarf had gone out at twilight, just before the rain began, and left him alone to sleep. A round of thunder had awakened him from a fitful dream in which he had been cornered behind a downtown show window by federal marshals and shot down mercilessly like a dog. His mother had been there, too, and he had cried for her to hold him as he bled. He had such dreams often in the sanitarium, cloudy black nightmares of drowning and doctors dressed as undertakers pushing squeaky-wheeled gurneys through unlit wards.

He coughed harshly and put his cap on and went outdoors into the drizzling rain. There were people all about, some sitting on the stoops of the small cabins, others crowded into touring tents or huddled under blankets in automobile beds. Across the camp, Alvin saw a pack of grimy children splashing gleefully in the mud and wondered where their folks were. He smelled wood smoke on the humid rain-washed air and a chicken roasting on a barbecue spit nearby. Electric lights glowed on a tall wire from one end of the camp to the other. He heard a concertina playing and walked in that direction. Rain dripped from the sycamores. Voices rose and echoed across the darkness like the ceaseless chatter of the sanitarium hallways that had kept him awake night after night when he was his sickest. A motor horn beeped and Alvin looked just quickly enough to see a liquor bottle shatter against a thick black walnut tree. A lucifer match flared and a woman laughed from the rainy shadows behind one of the cabins. She called out and the farm boy stopped and stared into the dark and a big derby-hatted man came forth soaking wet and stared back at him. Alvin almost gave him the raspberry, but knew he wasn't fit enough to scrap with a fellow that husky. The cabin door opened and a woman in curlpapers stuck her head out, saw the derby-hatted man, and shouted a dirty word at him. Alvin watched him zip open his trousers and piss across the mud toward the cabin door as it slammed shut again. Then the man closed his trousers and barked his own filthy obscenity and Alvin went off into the dark without looking back.

He sloshed past the middle of the auto camp where the sewer on the other side of the registration hut smelled ugly and foul. When the gang of soggy children ran by, Alvin kicked mud at them and they squealed with laughter. Rain poured down harder and a gusting breeze shook the wire of lights. Somewhere ahead, a pitchman called numbers for a beano game. Then Alvin saw a tent ringed with electric lanterns and picnic tables under the canvas roof and a crowd bigger than ever, the dwarf among them.

“93, LADIES AND GENTS, 93!”

The caller stood atop a makeshift podium with a megaphone, drawing game numbers scribbled on small wooden disks from a cigar box. The dwarf was sitting at a table with five other tourists: a ruddy-faced man in a squam hat and a slicker coat, and four women Alvin's mother's age in rainproof cotton or gabardine twill coats and hats. Each had a game card and a pile of dried beans beside it.

“Come in out of the rain, young fellow!” the ruddy fellow called out. “Pull up a chair!” He held a cheap stogie cigar between his teeth.

“Is this him?” one of the women in gabardine asked the dwarf. She wore a mesh net in her hair and a stick of punk behind one ear.

Rascal fiddled with his beans, then looked up with a smile. “Why, yes it is. Although I didn't think he'd ever wake up.”

Still muddleheaded from his nap, Alvin walked in under the tent covering while the pitchman called out another beano number.

“15, LADIES AND GENTS, 15!”

Water dripped on the table from his cap as Alvin shuffled himself into a folding chair. He felt as if everybody at the beano game had their eye on him and worried what the dwarf had told them. Alvin was used to keeping things confidential himself and didn't trust the dwarf not to feed them the wrong dope. He knew Rascal would tell a lie for a piece of toast.