Love & Other Crimes

by Sara Paretsky

  Around mid-afternoon, Sophia drove the buggy into town. Her lips were tight and white with rage, but she kept her temper to herself until they were on the road out of town. She was driving with only one horse.

  “You stole my horse, you left him tied up near a busy road. What is the matter with you? You come from a good home, you never wanted for anything! Why are you acting in this fashion, doing everything you can to turn me, and Rufus, too, against you? I can’t keep this from Fanny: that ten-dollar fine is a lot of money for me. Your father is going to have to pay me back. And then what will you do? Where else can you go?”

  Georgie didn’t try to say anything in her own defense: she didn’t feel guilty about going to the speakeasy, but she wished she had never taken Sophia’s horse.

  “Is he—is the horse hurt?” she asked timidly.

  “One of the neighbors saw him when he was out mulching at five this morning. He brought him home, undamaged but tired, which is why we’re driving one horse this afternoon.”

  Georgie’s contrition over the horse wasn’t as deep as her shame that Will Garrison had seen her in the courtroom. She kept that thought tucked away below her diaphragm—she certainly wasn’t going to share it with Cousin Sophia.

  When they reached the farm, Sophia said, “You go muck out the stable. You will make the care of these two horses your mission for the remainder of your time on the farm. I want the stalls spic-and-span, I want the horses’ coats glossy, I want them to have the water and food they need. You will never ride them again. Do you hear me?”

  Georgie nodded. “Yes, Cousin Sophia.”

  Sophia gave her a pair of men’s overalls. Not Rufus’s, which would have swamped Georgie, but a pair of her own. She ordered them from the Sears catalog to wear when she was doing farmwork herself.

  Georgie thought the worst was past, but when she washed herself off under the outdoor pump after working the rest of the afternoon in the barn, Rufus was waiting for her, shaking the evening paper under her nose.

  “How dare you? How dare you take advantage of my hospitality?”

  Georgie just had time to see the headline: Mayflower Descendant Descends to Public Drunkenness, before Rufus slapped her head so hard she was knocked off her feet.

  “Whore,” he grunted. “Rutting, drunken whore.”

  He yanked her to her feet, but she wriggled away before he could strike her a second time. Standing just out of his arm’s reach, Georgie pulled the top of her dress down under the overalls, flashing her breasts.

  “You want these, don’t you, Rufus? That’s why you’re so cranky all the time. You want them and you know I’ll never give them to you.”

  Rufus started after her, but before he reached her Sophia appeared in the yard.

  “I don’t know what game you two are playing, but stop it at once.”

  Sophia’s voice was even colder and angrier than when she’d lectured Georgie in the buggy. “The next time either of you behaves like this, you will both leave the farm, if I have to get the sheriff to remove you.”

  It was later that afternoon that the itinerant preacher appeared. He saw Rufus and got his permission to set the tent up on the Grellier property.

  6

  Georgie waited until Sophia and Rufus had gone to bed before reading the article in the Herald. As she read, her own temper rose up: Jarvis hadn’t mentioned that he was drunk as ten skunks. Instead, he made it sound as though he had merely gone to the School House as a reporter so he could let Douglas County know what went on inside its pure borders. And he’d spent a number of paragraphs on Georgie, the Mayflower Descendant in love with the Indians.

  Miss Entwistle consorted with some of the young bucks at our local Indian school after yesterday’s powwow. Superintendent Macalaster’s wife tried to speak to her about the dangers intimacy between white girls and Indian boys holds for both races, but Miss Entwistle seems to think that her Puritan ancestors protect her from following normal behavioral conventions—as she demonstrated at the School House that same night. She ordered gin from the bemused bartender, and made herself quite the spectacle for all the rowdies who usually frequent such a place.

  Georgie tore the paper into spills and laid them in with the coals in the stove. When Sophia lit the fire in the morning to make Rufus his fried eggs, the story would go up in smoke. She lay in bed in her stuffy room but couldn’t sleep. She wanted revenge on Arthur Jarvis, but couldn’t think of anything drastic or punitive enough.

  Around dawn her thoughts shifted to Will Garrison at the Indian school. They had been flirting in a harmless way, not consorting, but she wondered if he was in trouble with the school because of Jarvis’s story. She thought of writing to the superintendent’s wife or to the superintendent himself, but Mrs. Macalaster was a cold woman. She seemed to look down on the Indian students and she definitely looked down on Georgie.

  At five, she heard Rufus go out the kitchen door. She watched from the window as he went into the barn to do the morning milking, and then heard Sophia go down the stairs to the kitchen. She smelled the smoke as the fire started. At least Jarvis’s hateful words weren’t in the house any longer.

  There was a small table in the room where Georgie kept her toiletries and a pitcher and basin. She sat there to write a note to Will Garrison:

  Dear Mr. Garrison, I apologize for any trouble I may have brought into your life. I enjoyed meeting you at the powwow on Sunday and thought you were a super rider. I am living on my cousin Sophia’s farm, the Grellier farm, about two miles south of your school, near to Blue Mound. At the big crossroads between us and your school is a mailbox held into the ground with a couple of big rocks. If you would let me meet you to apologize in person, or if you would like me to return your red ribbon, leave a note for me under one of those rocks. Ever yours sincerely, Georgie Entwistle

  As soon as Rufus had headed to the fields where he and the handyman were haying, Georgie came down the stairs. Sophia was washing the breakfast dishes. She nodded at Georgie but didn’t speak.

  Georgie drank her coffee, ate a piece of toast with tomato preserves, put on her overalls to go out to the barn. The overalls had pockets; she slipped the letter into one of them and walked past the barn, grabbing one of the big straw hats that hung just inside the door as she passed. She made a detour across a field where she couldn’t be seen from the house or from the quarter section Rufus was working.

  The July heat was fierce and she was sweating heavily under the straw hat, but when she took it off, the sun glare made her eyes ache. She went to the school’s front door, forgetting that she wasn’t in Boston where her name and privilege got her past most barriers, forgetting that she was dressed like a farmhand.

  “Go out to the barn, boy, if you have a message from the farmer.” It was Mrs. Macalaster herself who answered the door.

  Georgie bit back a laugh. The overalls and hat were a perfect disguise, even hiding her sex. She walked around the main building to the barn, where some of the Indian boys were pitching down hay for the ponies and cows. Will Garrison wasn’t among them, but one of them took the letter from her and promised to give it to him. He eyed her narrowly; she was sure that, unlike the superintendent’s wife, his keen hunter’s instinct knew not just that she was a woman but also that she was the woman who’d been at the powwow.

  She scuttled away from the barn but stopped at a pump in the yard long enough to sluice her hot head and neck. Her overalls and the blouse she wore underneath them were dry by the time she got back to Sophia’s barn.

  She led the two horses out to a shady place in the enclosed field where Sophia usually left them for the day. The stalls were relatively clean from her previous day’s work. She shoveled the manure into the compost area behind the barn, put out clean straw, and rinsed off her overalls under the pump in the yard.

  She bypassed the kitchen when she came into the house: Rufus was at the table, eating corn bread and a fried pork chop. The hot food on the hot day made Georgie queasy. She too
k a cold bath, despite the interdiction from Sophia not to use water wantonly, and lay down to sleep.

  Rufus went over to the revival tent after supper. He urged Sophia and Georgie to go with him.

  “A good sermon that brought you to a sense of your sins would be the best thing you could do for your immortal soul,” he said to Georgie.

  “You have such a good sense of my sins, I expect Jesus will pay more attention to what you have to say about them than he will me,” Georgie said.

  Rufus glowered at her but left for the meeting without saying anything back. Georgie sat in the parlor with Sophia and watched her darn socks. Finally she went up to bed, waiting for Sophia to turn out the lamp in the parlor. When she heard her cousin climb the stairs, she slipped down the stairs in her stockinged feet and then out the back door.

  The house was between her and the tent, but she could see bonfires shooting up flames, and could hear the singing and some of the excited cries from the sinners. She walked to the mailbox she had described in her letter and lifted the rocks. No answer had come from Will Garrison.

  As she walked back to the house, automobiles began coming toward her: the damned and the saved leaving the revival. She stumbled into the ditch to keep from being seen and tore her good silk stockings on the nettles.

  Georgie went to the mailbox faithfully for three nights, and on the Thursday was rewarded: Garrison himself rose from the shadows.

  Georgie wanted to say something bold, the kind of comment she was used to making to the boys she knew at home, but she felt embarrassed and unlike herself.

  “You came yourself?” she finally blurted.

  “I was leaving a note for you, but then I saw you walking down the road.”

  “They told me you have a curfew.”

  “Yes, but the windows open. It’s not so hard to jump out. Harder, maybe, to jump back in.”

  “Are you in trouble because of me?” Her voice had gone up half a register, making her sound like a child. She hated it but couldn’t seem to control it.

  “In a small way,” he said. “The superintendent knows that Indian boys are weak in the face of temptation, and that a white woman is a powerful temptation. Almost as strong as drink. He and Mrs. Macalaster blame you for trying to lead me astray.”

  His voice was steady, and in the dark she couldn’t tell if he was teasing or if he truly believed it. She felt her face grow hot.

  “I didn’t want to lead you astray,” she said in her little-girl voice. “I wanted—my family in Boston sent me here because at home I—they didn’t like how I acted. Too wild. And on my cousin Sophia’s farm I have been so bored. I thought the powwow would be exciting.”

  “You hoped for wild Indians who would let you behave wildly. I can’t be a wild person for you, Miss Entwistle.”

  “Georgie,” she said.

  “For Georgie, either.” He turned to walk away.

  “You looked happy galloping on your pony,” she called after him. “Happy to be wild for a minute. And that’s what I want, a minute to be happy.”

  He came back and put his hands on her shoulders. “Miss Georgie, for you this is a vacation or maybe it is a rest cure, but for me this is life. I am at this school, with all the rules that I find stupid, because I need to help my family. We are helpless against the white men. As Little Crow truly spoke, you keep coming with your guns and your own laws that you twist and turn for your own advantage.

  “Do you know that the land where your cousin farms was under water and home to many thousand waterbirds only sixty years ago? My family were driven here from lands to the north and the east, but we learned to live with those birds. Now you have drained the land and made it white people’s farms. To help my family I cannot be wild. I must be the tamest of all tame Indians. My mother and my grandmother sent me here with that mission.”

  He bent and kissed her and turned and left.

  When Georgie got back to the farm, the revival seemed to be at a fever pitch. She went into the tent. The smell of all the sweaty bodies, the smell of sex, the people bowing and kneeling and moaning, swept across her and she began to shout and kneel and writhe with them. No cocaine and Charleston party had ever been this full of hot raw emotion.

  “Sister, what’s your name, sister?” the preacher shouted at her.

  “I’m a wild bird,” she said. “Birdie is my name.”

  “Birdie, come forward, confess your sins to Jesus.”

  People gathered around her, chanting, “Confess, confess, confess to the Lord and be saved.”

  “I confess,” she said. “I confess to wildness.”

  7

  Georgie slept late the next morning. When she came down, Rufus was crossing the yard to the kitchen; it was close to eleven, time for the fried chicken whose smell made Georgie sick, not hungry.

  Sophia wished her good morning and reminded her that the horses needed to be cared for.

  “Yes, cousin,” Georgie said.

  She swallowed her coffee and started to pull on the overalls that were hanging by the back door. She was stiff in every limb and almost fell over as she hoisted her legs into the heavy denim.

  Rufus grabbed her forearm before she could go down the stairs to the yard. “You were in the tent last night, confessing the sin of wildness. Everyone wants to know, was that a mockery or was it a true confession?”

  Georgie pulled her arm free. “That’s between me and Jesus, Cousin Rufus. None of your business.”

  “If it was genuine, and you’ve really repented your wildness, why did you call yourself ‘Birdie’? Why not give them your real name?”

  “Thanks to that reporter, everyone in your county knows my name. When I’m confessing to the Lord, he knows who I am, but your friends and neighbors don’t have to. Now if you’ll excuse me, Cousin Rufus, your mother-in-law’s horses need tending to.”

  “Just so you know, Georgina, if that was a true confession, if you’ve given your heart and soul to the Lord, we’re having a group baptism here at the horse trough on Sunday afternoon.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Sophia had stood at the screen door listening, but she didn’t comment. That had been Georgie in the tent last night. What was the girl up to? Ragging Rufus, going to Jesus, or something else? Sophia had seen those tent revivals, she knew the emotions that swept through them. They were like prairie fires—easy to start, impossible to control.

  In fact, the fire was already spreading, a plume of smoke here, a lick of flames there, because there is always fire if there’s smoke. One of the people driving away from the revival Thursday night had seen Will Garrison with his hands on Georgie’s shoulders. Wild girl, wild Indian, she had come to Jesus but he was a savage interfering with a white girl.

  By Saturday afternoon, the story was all over the county. Men confronted Rufus that night in the tent.

  What are you going to do about it, Rufus Schapen? Your own cousin, your own home, you going to let that savage get away with it?

  As the meeting revved up in intensity, Rufus glared down the men around him. “Anyone can talk, but who can act? If I act, am I on my own or are you with me?”

  “With you,” they shouted eagerly.

  They piled into their Model-Ts and As, bringing Rufus into the lead car. They drove to the school, knocked down the door, found the dorm, found Will Garrison, and dragged him to the school yard. To a tree.

  Georgie heard about it at the social hour after church the next morning. Indian boy hanged in the night. A lynching, but he’d been seen out on a county road with a white girl. Sidelong glances at Georgie, who said nothing. On the drive home, Sophia tried to talk to her about what had happened, but the girl had disappeared into a remote place, so deep inside herself that she seemed not to hear a word. She had turned a pasty white and gave off the smell of vomit. Sophia touched her forehead; it was cold, despite the hot day.

  When they got to the house, Sophia told Rufus she did not want the baptism on her land, in her hors
e trough.

  “No way to stop it, Mama Sophia,” he grunted. “Don’t even know who’s fixing to come, couldn’t get word to them if I wanted to. Got a white robe laid out on Georgie’s bed for her. Wash yourself in the blood of the Lamb and your wild ways will come to an end.”

  Sophia helped Georgie up the stairs.

  “You lie down, you stay in bed. I’m bringing you up a cup of tea, and then you sleep. Don’t go out to that trough, don’t make another public display of yourself. Please, Georgie.”

  Georgie might have heard her, hard to say. She took off her shoes and her silk stockings, though, and lay under the covers. Sophia put the white robe on a chair. The group baptism wasn’t for another three hours; with luck Georgie would sleep through it.

  Sophia was worn herself and went to her bedroom to rest. As she hung her dress in the wardrobe she watched Rufus cross the field to his parents’ house. He knew she was angry about the Indian boy; he was hiding with his mother, as he usually did when Sophia was angry. He’d be back at five, though, swelling with importance at the trough—her trough.

  Afterward, Sophia asked herself why she’d left the robe in Georgie’s room. Why she hadn’t stayed with Georgie. Afterward, when the preacher showed up with his eager penitents, and preacher and penitents all screamed hysterically to see the body in the trough, weighted down with the heavy rock Georgie had carried up the road from the mailbox.

  Afterward, when Lawyer Greeley refused to redo her will so she could leave the Grellier farm to the Indian school—I can’t let you do that, Miz Tremont. No, it’s not because of what people will say. It’s because Rufus can make a good case in court, overturn the will, eat up the value of the farm in lawsuits.

  Afterward, she looked at the farmhouse, gray, worn, as she herself was gray and worn. Her whole life given in service to a piece of land. She’d never danced the Charleston or inhaled cocaine or even drunk as much as a thimble of wine.

  She looked at the tintype of her father and mother in pride of place on her mother’s piano, the picture taken by an itinerant photographer four months before her father’s murder.