Hard Ground

by Joseph Heywood

  “I am reading,” Bapcat countered. “Only you seem able to talk and listen at the same time.”

  “There is no need for that tone of voice, gospodin. I am merely sharing an observation.”

  “Open the door if you think someone’s there.”

  “My ears suggest something, not someone.”

  “By the time you get around to the door, it will be long gone, this thing you think you hear.”

  “You are so quick to belittle my hearing acumen?”

  “Talk is no strain on you, only for the rest of us forced to listen.”

  “It would serve you well professionally to learn to talk more. Partners should share their thinking, their dreams, ideas, fears, everything.”

  Bapcat sighed. He too now heard the heavy sound outside the door, put the book aside, walked to the door, opened it, and found himself face-to-face with a long-necked red mule of gargantuan proportions, breath blasting from its fire-red face and spurting small clouds in the icy air. Bapcat touched the animal’s soft muzzle. “Why, what’re you doin’ here, Joe?”

  The mule, which stood almost eighteen hands at its withers, towered above its Swedish owners, the Skojoldebrand brothers, fishermen out of Eagle Harbor, who were nowhere to be seen. In winter, Goran and Palle Skojoldebrand rented an old mining house a mile north of the deputies across the Houghton County line and inside Keweenaw County.

  Bapcat and Zakov sometimes visited the Swedes. Goran was morose and seldom spoke. Palle was gregarious by Swedish standards but spoke English in a nearly unintelligible accent. The brothers made their own vodka and flavored it with various spices and fruits. The giant mule lived in the fishermen’s house in winter and invariably greeted Bapcat like a long-lost friend.

  “Joe’s here,” Bapcat said over his shoulder to Zakov.

  “Alone or with the Swedling mutes?”

  “Appears it’s just him.”

  “Perhaps he is fleeing Goran. In his position, I would no doubt do the same, only I would have done so many years ago.”

  “There’s too much snow to take him home,” Bapcat said, opening the door wide and encouraging the animal to enter. Joe ducked his massive head as he confidently stepped inside.

  Zakov observed, “We had many muls in the czar’s army, but nothing of our Joe’s proportions. Even medieval Russian battle horses would be dwarfed by this creature. I must duly commend my partner’s hospitality but also must point out we now have an outsize four-legged creature inside our cozy abode. Am I to assume our dear friend Joe will take his meals at the table with us, and do you think you could you share the next step in this developing plan? Or will the next step be as much a surprise as dear Joe’s arrival?”

  The mule bared its teeth and issued a horselike whinny and soft bray. The two men laughed.

  “It would seem,” Zakov said, “that our friend also wallows in suspense over what comes next.”

  Bapcat began to dress in winter clothes.

  “Where are we going?” Zakov asked.

  “Feels like something’s really wrong,” Bapcat said.

  The Russian pushed aside his tea makings and also began to dress. “The vehicle is out of question after this snowfall.”

  “We have snowshoes.”

  Zakov grunted displeasure. “I welcome the time when such dreadful devices will be relegated to a museum of wilderness oddities instead of everyday winter conveyances.”

  “No need for both of us to make the trip.”

  “Are you so arrogant as to think you are the only one with the power to sense trouble?”

  Bapcat ignored the comment. “I think we should backtrack Joe as far as we can.”

  “There seems a lull in the wind at the moment, and I concur.”

  “If we lose the tracks, we’ll head directly from that point to the Skojoldebrand brothers’ house.”

  “Shall we alert Sheriff Hepting?”

  “Too soon. This may amount to a simple matter of Joe wandering off. Maybe he got lost in the storm and couldn’t find home.”

  “It appears you know little of mules, my friend. Mul, as we call this animal in Russian, like a horse, does not lose its bearings, but unlike horses, they seldom panic. The mul is a practical animal with immensely more common sense than its human masters.”

  Bapcat knew mules from his time in the Dakotas. He had ridden a steady animal named Reggie when he guided Teddy Roosevelt on several hunting trips. And he knew horses from his cowboying and Rough Rider days, though the troop in Cuba had been unhorsed and reduced to foot cavalry when they assaulted the San Juan Heights and became famous in the process.

  “What about our friend Joe?” Zakov asked.

  “He can stay here.”

  “A decision obviously begging disaster,” the Russian argued.

  “I’m not leaving him alone outside, and I don’t want to try to lead him home with the two of us on snowshoes.”

  “Zakov grudgingly accepts this logic.”

  “That sure makes my day complete,” Bapcat said sarcastically.

  “This peninsula is Siberia exaggerated,” Zakov said when they got under way. “Same cold, same winds, but far more snow.”

  The deputy wardens followed the giant mule’s tracks back to its owners’ small house. The animal lived in a stable built along the wall of the house, but there was an opening that allowed it free entry to the house, which the brothers had bought on credit from a mining company. Bapcat had no idea where the mule had come from. It seemed the brothers had always had Joe.

  No smoke was coming from the chimney. Bapcat shucked off one of his beaver choppers and tried the door: unlocked. He stepped inside, found a lantern, and struck a match to give them light. No sign of Goran Skojoldebrand, but Palle was in a chair next to the wood stove, which was cold. The man’s face was waxy and blue.

  “Get wood,” Bapcat told his partner. “We need heat fast.”

  “The woodbin is empty,” Zakov reported.

  “Break something and burn it. Palle is barely breathing.” Bapcat went into a bedroom to gather quilts and blankets and saw blood and tissue all over one wall and the bare wood floor.

  He wrapped the barely conscious Palle like a mummy.

  A fire was soon going and throwing off heat. The two men pushed the Swede close to the stove and rubbed him, trying to increase circulation. “Palle, we’re here. Where’s Goran?” Bapcat asked, getting no response.

  Zakov repeated the question; same result.

  The heat increased. The man began to move under the blankets, his eyes flickering.

  “Palle?” Bapcat said. “It’s me, Lute.”

  Zakov went around looking into cabinets and drawers. “Nothing here,” he reported, “no wood, no food, nothing, like Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. The larder is in name only.”

  “Heat water on the stove,” Bapcat said, and the Russian set to work immediately.

  The deputies always carried packs with tea, sugar, extra provisions, and clothing, never knowing what circumstances might conspire to threaten them. Or where. Up here on the Keweenaw, weather was an unpredictable and ever-present predator that found ways to kill humans year-round. Bapcat tapped cayenne pepper into the hot water, an old remedy that beat brandy for cold and chills.

  Palle Skojoldebrand fluttered on the edge of life. “Joe found you, did he, Lute?”

  “Tea,” Bapcat told Zakov, and they held a cup close to the Swede’s lips and helped him sip.

  “Joe came to our place.”

  “Good, he’ll be happy dere witchus. I put Goran oot beck for dose wuffs. Dey gott eat same we do, eh.”

  Bapcat and Zakov exchanged glances. Zakov raised an eyebrow and moved away.

  “Out back, Palle? You put Goran out back?”

  “Yeh, we lose dat fish
bees’nees, dis place, ev’t’ing she gone, no food neither. Goran cry two day, take gun to mout’. I tole him we got hard time before plenty, donchuknow, we start with nothings once, do again, donchuknow. Goran said give Joe youse, and I done it.”

  “If you need money, you can sell Joe,” Bapcat offered.

  Palle Skojoldebrand made a pained face. “Joe’s famblee. Can’t sell famblee, Lute. Gott wunt want us sell famblee.”

  Bapcat didn’t know what to say.

  “Joe, he yore mule now. Gone die, Lute. Ticker bad. Wanted go like Goran, go togedder, like we live are whole dem lifes, but I got no guts, me. Joe, he yours. Goran said he always like you best.”

  Zakov came in from outside, sweeping snow off his clothes, made a pistol shape with his hand, put his forefinger in his mouth, and shook his head.

  “Palle, we’ll call the doc. We know a good one. He’s a pal.”

  “Iss no damn good, Lute. What he gone do, make me new heart?” The Swede grinned crookedly.

  “I’m no doctor,” Bapcat said, “but I hear they can do all kinds of things nowadays.”

  “Not stuff I need; damn sawboneses iss like dose damn benkers, eh. Money, money, money,” Palle mumbled. “Take lots money, dose guys. We buy beesnees, what benk call dat moralgauge, twent year, pay so much end every fish year. This year not so much fish, donchuknow. Benk says, ‘Sorry, boys, our house, our boat, our bisnisst, not yours no more, you not pay, we take back, too bad not enough fish dis year.’ Den dey call company stores, tell dem no more credit for dose Swede fitcher boy, and dat’s end of us, donchuknow. Like I tell, Goran cry two day. Was good brudder, him. Lute, you take good care Joe. He good brudder, too.”

  Palle Skojoldebrand died with his eyes open, gawking into an unseen void.

  The deputy wardens felt helpless and did not speak until Zakov declared, “Laissez-faire capitalism: You have here its fruit, men as means, with less value than machines, the identical callousness we observed during the strike. The two brothers were killed by capitalism.”

  The violent miners’ strike lasted July of last year into early this year, with lots of victims falling along the way. The copper mine operators, fueled by East Coast money, were kings in the Keweenaw, and when the miners walked out, the operators had gone all out to break the back of the union and everyone who supported it.

  “The French,” Zakov proclaimed, “were fond of snatching savages and barbarians from the New World back to France, under the mistaken assumption that they could inculcate in such beings a veneer of civilization.”

  The Russian’s changes in subject and direction could be dizzying. First he’s talking about the copper strike, then French and savages? It was often impossible for Bapcat to keep up with the man’s thoughts and words. “And?”

  Zakov looked at his partner. “I have had the pleasure of reading on one occasion a tome by the French intellectual Montaigne, who reported Brazilian Indians captured by the French and brought to France as captives. They were paraded around the country and finally to the king’s court and afterward asked what they thought about what they had seen. They said they had seen white men eating and drinking and gorging themselves and mating and outside those places thousands of poor and starving men, and having seen this, the Indians could not understand how the downtrodden should accept this and not kill their rich tormentors, take the possessions they needed, and burn the rest.”

  “Your point is beyond my horizon.” Bapcat had learned this phrase from the Russian and liked it.

  “Imbalance invariably brings eventual violent reaction.”

  “Like Bunker Hill and all that?” Bapcat’s knowledge of his country’s history was limited at best.

  “No, your country’s revolution was fomented and orchestrated almost exclusively by the rich, who didn’t want to pay more taxes to England. The rhetoric was woven around the concept of freedom, but make no mistake, it was and is about the colony’s rich protecting their money. If true human freedom had been the goal, the originators of the separation would have made sure there were no more slaves. It took you another war and millions of dead to make this happen. America says many fine words about freedom, but they are just often a mash of words. Money is what drives your country, Lute. All countries.”

  “The strike here was a kind of revolution,” Bapcat offered.

  “If widely construed, that is perhaps true, but at least the strike came from the bottom, from the workers themselves, not from the top. Those suffering the conditions and privations themselves fought to change them.”

  “The miners lost,” Bapcat said.

  “They all lost. Mr. Ford down in Detroit will steal labor from here by offering more than mine operators are willing to pay. The die is cast, and there will come a day in this country when the imbalance between rich and poor, have and have-not, will become so extreme that the little people of this country will rise up and take what they think is rightfully theirs, or more precisely take away from others what the masses view as not rightfully theirs.”

  “This has happened in other places?” Bapcat asked.

  “France, and I think it will soon happen in my Russia as well.”

  “A Russian revolution,” Bapcat asked. “Who will win, the czar?”

  “No, the czar is impotent, uncaring, and will be easily displaced, but it is impossible to predict what will replace royalty in the short term. Long term, all Russians will suffer and lose. It has always been so. We Russians have no experience in determining our own fate, individually or collectively. We are a political vacuum, naïfs awaiting disaster. First came Genghis Khan and his Mongols, later Bonaparte. Who and what will come next?”

  “You came here,” Bapcat said.

  “An exception proving the rule, my friend.”

  “Like our Swedish friends, then?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “We need to call John Hepting and the coroner and get them down here,” Bapcat told his partner.

  “They will shed few tears,” Zakov said. “Death in these surrounds is an unwanted but familiar neighbor. More importantly, what of the good mule, Joe?”

  “I think we will build a shelter for him, mebbe where the truck is now. We can build something else for the truck.”

  “At least the creature will be outside,” Zakov said.

  “But it will take us a while to build his shelter for him. We’ll have to keep Joe with us until breakup comes, and he can be outside.”

  “I foresee extremely unsettling domestic conditions,” the Russian carped.

  “I’ve been saying the same thing since the first day you showed up,” Bapcat quickly countered, thereby ending the interchange and discussion. He rolled a cigarette and lit it. The violence of last year’s strike had never left him. On Christmas Eve more than seventy innocents had died, and he and the Russian and their friend Dominick Vairo had helped recover the bodies, mostly young children.

  Cuba had been about principles, it seemed to Bapcat, fighting a foreign enemy for your country. But the strike had been about money and power, and nothing more, and this fact left him with an annoying edge that he was having trouble blunting. Having little formal education made the deputy warden self-conscious about his deficiencies and created in him a determination to improve himself. He wanted only to do a good job by doing the right thing and enforcing the law, but how did a man decide what right was? Who determined this? He didn’t know.

  Bapcat exhaled. In this case, right was taking care of the mule. That was an easy one. He knew most situations would be far more complicated and jumbled, and he hoped he would be up to the many tasks ahead.

  “Have you considered that the state may adjudge this mule to be its property, not yours?” Zakov asked.

  He had not. “Well, good. If Joe’s theirs, I guess they can’t complain about the money we spend on him, and if he ain’t the
irs, he’s ours, and they won’t have much say in what we do with what’s rightfully ours.”

  “The dispatch with which you speed to the simplest solution is forever astounding,” Zakov said, “and quite commendable.”

  “Go find a telephone and call the sheriff. I’ll stay with the brothers and think about all the things we should be doing for our new partner.”

  “You propose a lowly mule as our partner.”

  “Well, he is living with us, ain’t he?”

  “Temporarily, that is, for the time being.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” Bapcat said. “I done some thinking on the subject. Did you look around and sniff the Swedes’ place when we were inside? I think our Joe, unlike them Brazilian boys, your Frenchmen, seems pretty civilized and fits right into our place. The house hardly stunk at all.”

  Zakov looked as if he had something to say, but instead he took his snowshoes and announced he would go find a phone and call Sheriff Hepting. He turned after a couple of steps and looked back. “If our civilized mule suffers failings, I will not be cleaning up after him.”

  Bapcat smiled. “Aren’t you always lecturing me to see the best in people?”

  “A mule is not people.”

  “Well, I guess we’re gonna find that out,” Bapcat said.

  Black Beyond Black

  A Grady Service Story

  Doctor Vince Vilardo was standing beside his new 1974 Ford Country Sedan, gnawing his meerschaum pipe, which Conservation Officer Grady Service had never seen him light. Service eased shut his door and walked over to the internist-turned-county medical examiner.

  “What’s going on?”

  There were four sheriff’s cruisers and a state cop blue goose all parked in front of the small house, and first in line was Sheriff Hugh Vale Swick’s gold Buick station wagon with its outlandish white five-point stars on the doors, roof, and hood.

  Vilardo said in a hushed tone, “Bear carried off a three-year-old girl about an hour and some ago. Took her right off the back porch as her mama watched.”

  “Who’s on the trail?”

  “Nobody. Swick called Imago Moiles to bring his dogs.”