Echoes of the Fall

by Hank Early

  I did. “Jeb Walsh?” I offered.

  “That’s right, but sometimes the most evil men are the ones who know they’ve got something you want, and they know how to lord it over you just so.”

  “Well, Daddy did that,” I said.

  “Sure. I guess so. With you, especially. With me, it was more about my mother, about not wanting to disappoint her.”

  “Understood. So where are we going exactly?”

  “Stay on Fifty-Two. It’s a ways. Just relax and listen, okay?”

  I tried my best. Truthfully, relaxing just wasn’t an option. Distraction, though, had potential. I focused on trying to think about what Rufus might be able to show me. If it could have any bearing on the mystery of the Harden School. What had happened to the kid, Weston? Was I going to give up on that? And what about Joe? Didn’t I owe it to him to finish what he’d started?

  Not to mention that giving up on things had never been my style. I’d made a career out of solving mysteries, and I’d done it mostly through sheer force of will. Determination had been a far greater ally in getting to the bottom of problems than talent, smarts, or even luck. I tended to just wear a case down, or short of that, I simply used brute force to break it wide open.

  I could still do that much, couldn’t I? If the answer was no, I wasn’t sure who I was anymore.

  There was also Eddie Walsh and the other boys at the school to think about. They were depending on me. I couldn’t forget Rufus either. Despite his current easygoing manner, I still felt like something was off with him. There was certainly a physical element to my feeling: he was gaunter than usual. Pale and haggard, the way I used to look in the mirror after three or four nights without sleeping because of a case. It was probably how I looked now, too. I wasn’t sure because I hadn’t been able to bring myself to look in the mirror since I had cheated on Mary.

  “When I left the church, I went by my house for my fishing pole and twenty dollars I’d stashed away. Didn’t know where I was going. I just started walking. Went to Ghost Creek, followed it up the mountain to its source, and slept there for three or four days, fishing the creek. From there, I moved down the backside of the mountain, into the valley. I’d stop when I found a pretty spot by some water and make camp for a few days. I must have wasted a few months doing this very thing until I woke up one night shaking from the freezing cold. I knew I had to at least head to town to buy some warm clothes, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to go into Riley, because that was where I was most likely to see somebody from the Holy Flame, so I made the hike east toward Brethren. At the time, Brethren wasn’t much more than a couple of churches, a post office, and a gas station that also doubled as a general store. It was there I bought a winter coat and some new shoes. I didn’t have enough cash to pay for it, so the owner agreed to let me work it off on his farm. Wasn’t long before I’d paid the jacket off, and he hired me full-time. He let me sleep in a bunkhouse with the other workers. I was fairly happy. Didn’t even know it at the time.”

  I was on 52 now and was afraid Rufus had forgotten that I didn’t know where to go. “Do I just go all the way to Brethren?” I asked.

  “Not quite. There’s a farm right before the town where I want you to stop. Where are we now?”

  “Just passed Jessamine’s, about to hit downtown.”

  He nodded. “Still got about ten minutes before you need to start looking for it.”

  “So how did you hook up with Harden?” I asked.

  “I’m getting there,” he said. “Do me a favor?”

  “What?”

  “Pretend you are a patient man. It’s important for me to tell it my way.”

  “Sure.”

  He nodded and cleared his throat. He adjusted his shades on his nose and continued. He told me about being happy at the farm, about rising early and having his coffee in the morning dark before beginning work in the field each day. He told me about the work he did on the farm, and how the landowner said he wanted Rufus to come to dinner at his house one evening.

  “I sort of expected he might be about to set me up with his daughter. Only problem was he didn’t have one.” Rufus grinned at the memory. “No, he wasn’t setting me up with no girl. That came later. He was setting me up for another job, a bigger and better one.”

  He went on to tell me how Harden came by for dinner, how he talked to Rufus directly, man to man, and how Rufus found himself wanting to please the man despite his misgivings. I understood. It was exactly the way I’d always felt around my father.

  “Next thing I knew,” he said. “I was working at the school. They said I was a counselor, which meant I didn’t get paid much, but Harden believed I would be a teacher there one day, so I believed it too.” He fell silent, as if silently debating the internal logic of believing anything Harden had told him.

  “Was Dr. Blevins at the school then?”

  “Who?”

  “His name is Timothy Blevins. He’s supposed to be some kind of conversion therapist.”

  “You mean like converting kids from gay to straight?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus. It’s gotten worse, then.”

  “Worse?”

  “Where are we now?” he asked, ignoring my question.

  I told him we’d passed through the city and into the open part of the county, where the valley spread out briefly before turning to hills again, and finally mountains.

  “There’s an old farmhouse on the right. Be on the lookout for it and pull over when you get there.”

  I saw it a few minutes later. It was old, all right. Years of neglect had taken their toll on what might once have been a nice place. There was certainly plenty of land and two large barns, both of which were in better shape than the house.

  I pulled off the road into the overgrown grass of what passed for the front yard.

  “We’re here,” I said.

  “What’s it look like?”

  I described it to him, taking time to mention the way the woods behind the house seemed to be creeping toward the structure and would likely overtake it in the next year or two if somebody didn’t cut them back. I mentioned the wild roses that bloomed in an irregular pattern on one side of the house and the broken shutter hanging crookedly from a second-floor window.

  “What about the barns?” he asked.

  “There’s two. The bigger one is red, but it looks like it’s faded to almost pink. It needs a new roof. The door’s open.”

  “And the other one?”

  “More of a shed, I guess. It’s in decent shape. Not pretty to look at, but it would probably keep you dry in a rainstorm.”

  “I want to go in.”

  “The house?”

  “No, the barn. The smaller one.”

  “Why?”

  He sighed. “This is where I lived when I worked at the school. Harden arranged for me to stay with his sister, a woman named Leah Duncan. Her husband was a farmer in the area, and one of the all-time assholes you would ever want to meet. They lived here with their three children. All girls. The youngest two were twins. They were both a little younger than me. One was named Harriet and the other was Savanna.”

  “You lived in the barn?”

  “That’s right. The smaller one.”

  I killed the engine and we got out of the truck. I grabbed Rufus’s shoulder and turned him until he was facing the smaller barn. “Straight line,” I said. “Clear path.”

  He nodded. “Sorry about earlier.”

  “Why? You were right. Just because I’m miserable doesn’t mean I shouldn’t help others.”

  “I’m miserable too,” he said.

  “I’m beginning to sense that. Do you want to elaborate?”

  “I think I’m about to.” And that was all he said on the matter until we came to the smaller barn.

  “Is it locked?” he asked.

  “We’ll find out.” I reached for the sliding doors and pulled one of them to the right. It felt stuck. Not locked. “Give me a hand
,” I said, and guided him to the door. Together we pulled it open. When it slid back, a sweet, old smell rushed out as if it had been waiting to escape all of these years. Without waiting on me, Rufus stepped inside the old structure. He stood there in the half-light, inhaling deeply. His face changed then. Instead of gaunt and worried, it expanded with something like light. But the light was soon dimmed by deep furrows forming above his black shades. Lines of sorrow, I thought as he began to speak.

  27

  “The twins were interesting to me from the very start. They had a connection I’d always missed. Hell, I didn’t have any family besides my mother, and by then, I didn’t even have her. I had no friends. I’d never had a girlfriend. Savanna. That was her name. The sister. Of the two, she was the more confident one. She seemed to be the dominant one in their relationship. She was always sure of herself, never timid, but she still made you feel important, like she genuinely cared about you. It’s how she treated everyone.” He shook his head. “Crazy, but it was the sexiest damned thing I’d ever seen. If only it had been real.”

  He laughed and turned his head up to the rafters, breathing in the scent of the place again. “Of course, she could have acted just about any old way and still been sexy to me. I was hard up by that point for female companionship, and she was like sex on wheels. Long, blonde hair, legs that never ended, a smile that lit me up. When she showed it, I felt like somebody was flipping a switch inside me. My pecker went hard as a two-by-four and nearly as straight. You ever been just sick for a girl before, Earl? When she’s all you can think about, all you can see? That was me.”

  I started to explain that’s how it was with Mary, but I never got the words out. It wouldn’t have sounded believable after the shit I’d just pulled. He pressed on, his head still turned toward the rafters. I followed what his eyes would have been looking at if he’d still had the use of them, and I saw there was a loft up above. No way to access it, but it was there nonetheless, and I wondered if it had been the site of some memorable romantic encounter with Savanna.

  “The only thing that kept Savanna from being absolutely perfect in my mind was something I couldn’t put my finger on. These days I know more and could name it. Then, there just seemed to be something slightly off about her. I didn’t see it as much as Harriet complained about her. According to Harriet, she was cruel. Everyone thought they were close, with a connection only twins could have, but in reality Harriet just wanted to get away from her. I suppose that should have been enough to warn me, but I was so smitten by her beauty, by the attention she eventually began to show me. You know …” He trailed off, shaking his head. His eyes seemed filled with light, and for a moment it was as if he almost focused on me directly. He did that sometimes. He could figure out just where a person was in the room and track them. It was uncanny, but almost everything about Rufus was uncanny. This whole story he was revealing seemed almost the stuff of legend. I looked around, trying to imagine him sleeping in this old barn, tried to imagine a young Rufus freed from the shackles of my father’s church, couldn’t quite do it.

  “You know,” he went on. “The way she fooled me isn’t too unlike the way your father fooled me, the way Randy Harden and Steve Deloach fooled me. They all saw my weakness. I was a kid who knew nothing about the world, a kid who needed human connection, but even more I needed to understand how everything worked, how it fit together. I found out all right.”

  “You okay?”

  “Sure. It’s just … Well, shit. You know enough about regret to understand what it can do to you. It’s like carrying around that old millstone. Just gets a little heavier year after year.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I did know about regret. I just didn’t know about his regret yet. I hoped I would soon, though. I felt myself getting a little impatient with his slow and detailed delivery.

  His eyes seemed to find me again. For a moment, I believed he really saw me, or maybe I was the one seeing him for the first time. It was a different Rufus. Not the old blind version that liked whiskey and politics and being a grumpy wiseass, and not the choirboy version of himself he’d been when I’d known him a long time ago before his blindness, before he’d decided to be an atheist and, ironically, a better Christian than just about anybody I’d ever known. This was none of those men, and yet somehow all of them. This was the Rufus who’d broken free of the shackles of one institution only to find himself ensnared in something even more powerful. It was a Rufus I’d never known, one who’d had to create himself out of nothing, just as we all had to do. That he’d become such an original, such a distinct vision of himself, was a testament to his doggedness, his creativity, and his “fuck all” individualism. The version I was seeing of him now was not these things, not exactly, but rather the potentiality of these things. The version I was seeing now was timeless, at once a ghost from his past and a man haunted by his present and all possible iterations of his future.

  “Before I go any further, I need to tell you about the waterfall near the school. Have you ever seen it?”

  “Yeah. When I went out there with Ronnie a few weeks ago. It’s beautiful.”

  He grinned, seeming to remember it in his mind’s eye. “That it is. Do you know why they call it Two Indian Falls?”

  “No, but I’m going to guess two Indian lovers jumped to their deaths there.”

  “Wrong. The story says two boys challenged each other to see who could jump across to the other side.”

  I remembered standing on the large rock a few weeks ago. So much had changed in that short time. I’d learned about Eddie Walsh and Weston Reynolds. I’d lied to the significant other of the man I buried. Jesus, just thinking of Joe’s face did something to me I couldn’t put into words. It felt like I’d been betrayed, except somehow I was the one who’d betrayed myself. That was exactly what I’d done when I’d slept with Daphne. I’d betrayed Mary and myself. And now Mary was gone. And here I was standing in the past with Rufus. I thought about the chasm near the falls. I thought about what a monumental leap it would be to make it to the other side. Monumental, but maybe not impossible.

  “The story says a bunch of people gathered to watch, and the two boys both prepared to jump. One of the reasons the boys wanted to do it was no one had ever been to the other side before. There’s no way to get to it short of being dropped in by a helicopter. The Native Americans believed there were answers to be found on the other side. Answers to great mysteries. Who knows where. Maybe they were written on the inside of some caves that could only be accessed by jumping across.”

  It was a tantalizing thought, but if acted upon, I couldn’t imagine it not ending in disaster.

  “The boys waited until dusk, because there was some legend that said there was a wind at sunset that would blow you across. The first boy paced off his steps, standing on the broad flat rock that juts out into the falls. He backed up as far as he could and sprinted toward the gap. They say he jumped too high, and not far enough. His hand slid down the rocks on the other side as he tried to gain purchase, and he fell to his death. The crowd went wild with grief. They begged the other boy not to try it, pleading with him, telling him how foolish it was and that the first boy was faster and stronger and he hadn’t even come close. But the story says the second boy was honorable, that he told the gathered crowd he had no choice but to honor his friend’s death by keeping his word.

  “‘To not jump,’ he said, ‘would be to die.’

  “An old woman broke free from the crowd and clambered up on the rock beside him. She blessed him, saying a prayer to the spirt of the wind, that it might guide him across. Then they helped her down, and the second Indian was alone.

  “He paced off his steps, once and then again, and then held his hand up, checking the wind. There was none. He waited for some time for the wind to return, but it seemed as if it had given up for the evening. The sun was gone; a darkness held sway over the land. The story says a quarter moon hung in the sky, but its light was dimmed by heavy clouds.

&
nbsp; “Soon, the people began to chant his name, which was Yaholo. It means ‘one who shouts,’ because Yaholo was known for his great cry while playing with the other children. Over and over, they chanted it, and all the while the sun disappeared over the horizon.

  “When he finally made the leap, no one could see. They heard his signature yell as he flew over the waterfall, and some claimed to see a dark shape make it across to the other side. Several people described seeing him in midair, and others swore he fell through the dark gap between the bluffs. No one could agree. The next day, when the men went down to the bottom of the waterfall, all they found was the body of the first Indian. They never found the second one.”

  28

  Rufus heard the story of the second Indian told so many times in his first few weeks at the Harden School, he found himself wondering how it had even survived so long, and how much of it was true. Every time he heard it, some of the details were different, but the essential mystery of the story stayed the same: no one knew whether the second Indian had lived or died. And that left the possibility of making the leap across an open question. Not only an open question, but a tantalizing one.

  Rufus quickly discovered all the kids in the school had one thing in common: they wanted out. The campus was surrounded by a twelve-foot-tall fence with electric barbed wire along the base and the top, making it a dangerous proposition to attempt to climb over or dig under. The gates were under constant surveillance, and rumors of cameras were prevalent. All visitors were closely monitored and vetted. That left the falls, and the single flat rock that was open to any and all of the more adventurous teens to stand on and to wonder if perhaps one of them had what it took to make the leap. As far as what the students believed about the second Indian, they were mostly split. Some swore he’d made it, while others expressed a well-earned cynicism.

  For his own part, Rufus wasn’t so sure. He often spent his break time standing on the rock, trying to judge the leap. He was of two minds about it. First, it was probably technically possible for a man in good shape, with good timing, and a good wind to make the leap. Second, anyone who tried it would almost surely be committing suicide. There were just too many factors that had to go exactly right.