To Darkness and to Death

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  He had shrugged off the letters from the town looking for payment of his property taxes. What could they do to him? His parents had paid off the mortgage in 1985. When they divorced, his dad had swapped his mom’s half of the house for half his pension, the RV, and her name on his life insurance policy. His mom had come out the better in that deal two years ago, when his dad, sick of getting yelled at by his girlfriend for his hacking cough, went to the doctor’s for an antibiotic to clear it up and walked out with a diagnosis of metastasized lung cancer. He died five months later. He had been fifty-six. Randy had inherited the house and land, free and clear.

  What did they mean, a lien? He envisioned the cops coming to his door, turning him and Lisa out, the house foreclosed on and auctioned off. Where would they go then? Homeless, jobless, the credit cards maxed out. He winced, envisioning asking for a loan from Lisa’s parents. Or worse, having to move in with them. He could just imagine what his disapproving sister-in-law and her prick of a husband would make of that.

  He needed his job back. That one thing, Ed Castle not closing up shop, would make the difference between Randy and Lisa having a life or going straight down the toilet. Maybe Castle could be persuaded to hand over the machinery to Randy and the rest of the crew. They could keep the operation going, even send a little money to Ed down in Florida. Surely that would set him up better than just tossing in the towel and living on Social Security.

  The blinding rightness of this idea was like hot, strong coffee on a cold morning, filling him up, warming his fingers and toes. He stood up, excited to talk with Ed, to point out retiring didn’t have to mean the end of the business. Then he’d get hold of the other guys. He was sure they’d want to continue logging if they could. They would all toss in together. One of those—whaddya call it?—collectives. Boot heels ringing on the sidewalk, Randy made for his motorcycle. Lisa was right. He always managed to come out on top.

  10:45 A.M.

  There were blood smears on her father’s SUV. The Explorer was blocking the driveway, an anodized rack mounted over its back door. It looked like any other bike carrier, except that this rack was stained with red and crusting blotches that spattered a trail up the drive toward the detached garage. Looked like he got his buck this year. Becky stepped carefully as she crossed to the front steps. Her mother would have her hide if she tracked blood onto the floor. She checked the bottom of her boots and scraped them hard on the brushy doormat before opening the door.

  “Hey,” she called. “Anybody home? Mom?”

  The small downstairs was deserted. She walked through the kitchen and out onto the back porch. She could hear an electric whine. “Dad?” she shouted.

  “Around here,” came an answering yell.

  Becky clattered down the back steps and followed the sound around the edge of the garage. The coppery smell of blood nearly overwhelmed her. Her father had the deer hanging upside down from a metal bar chained to a rough wooden frame. Its gut was slit stem to stern, and its hind legs, which were spread wide and clamped to the bar, glistened in the cold sunlight. They had been skinned and cut off below the joint.

  “Eugh! Dad, what are you doing?”

  Her father paused from sawing straight into the buck’s crotch. “I’m skinning out my deer.” He was wearing baggy coveralls that looked like the aftermath of a terrible fight—all bruise-yellow, greasy grime, and blood. “Then, after he’s hung for a few days, I’m gonna butcher him.”

  Becky winced. “Can’t you get someone to do that for you?”

  Her father turned, the hacksaw in his hand. He had that look on his face, the one that said, Goes off to a fancy college and she loses all common sense. “Sure I could. But I’m not about to spend good money paying someone to do what any fool with a knife and a saw can do.” He replaced the hacksaw on a strip of cardboard that was laid out like a serial killer’s surgical set, with two wicked knives and a pair of long-handled pruning shears.

  “I expected to see you on your last legs, the way Bonnie was talking this morning. Shows what she knows.”

  Ed worked his hands well into the hide near the deer’s hindquarters and began to peel the skin off the body. “Bonnie’s just worried about your mother and me.”

  “And I’m not.”

  “Didn’t say that, did I?”

  “You don’t say a lot of things. You’ve barely spoken to me since I started working on the Haudenosaunee project.”

  “That what you call it? A project?” The hide stuck. Ed tugged it, then reached for one of the knives. “So what are you doing here? I mean, besides giving me grief. Weren’t you supposed to be over to Haudenosaunee puttin’ chains across the roads so’s no one could get in tomorrow?”

  “Nobody’s chaining up the roads, Dad. I was visiting the great camp with a contractor. I’m trying to get things in order, so that after GWP buys the land and signs it over to us tonight, the ACC will be ready to implement its vision as soon as possible.”

  The words were barely out of her mouth before she wished them back. Sure enough, her father’s eyebrows rose, in an exaggeratedly impressed expression.

  “Implement your vision. ’S that what you people at the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation call shutting down the timber harvest and throwing folks out of work?”

  Becky felt her face flushing hot. “No, that’s what we call returning the land to its natural state.”

  “This land’s been occupied three hundred years. More, if you count the Iroquois. What’s this natural state you think you can get it back to?”

  She knew she wasn’t going to win this, but she wanted her dad, for once, to get at least part of what she was trying to do. “We’ll be taking down all the buildings. Volunteers will remove the alien plants and replace them with native species. The forest will have a chance to resume its natural life cycle, unmanaged by harvesting or planting.”

  “Firetrap, that’s what you’ll get with no harvesting. Just like you get diseased herds if you don’t hunt the deer.” He sawed in and out with his knife. The hide sagged away from the raw flesh beneath it. “Your group really tearing down the Haudenosaunee buildings? I was up there this morning, you know. Didn’t look as if anyone was getting ready to move. What does Eugene van der Hoeven think about you putting the wrecking ball to his home?”

  For a moment, Becky considered telling her father the whole story of this morning’s disastrous visit to Haudenosaunee. If she did, though, God alone knew how her dad would react. He might be mad at her for her role in closing off the land to logging, but that didn’t mean he’d take kindly to a nutcase threatening her with a gun. Her dad had always been overly protective of his girls.

  “He’s not happy about it,” she said, truthfully enough. “But it’s not as if the ACC is tossing him out into the snow. Millie has arranged for him to move in with her, when she returns to Montana. He’ll be set for life with what he’ll make from GWP.”

  Her dad circled the deer, his knife lolling in his hand. “It ain’t always about the money, Becks. I don’t know as Eugene van der Hoeven has left Haudenosaunee since he came back from the hospital, after the fire. That was, what, seventeen, eighteen years ago?” He grabbed the flopping white-and-brown tail, pulled it away from the body, and began hacking it off. “So you’re all done with your work for today, and the only thing left to do is go swanning off to the ball tonight, huh?”

  “It’s a signing ceremony, Dad, not a ball. And no, I’m not done with my work today. That’s why I’m here.” She folded her arms across her chest and took a slow breath. She wanted to sound relaxed and authoritative, not like a girl asking to borrow the family car. “As you may know, after GWP transfers the rights to Haudenosaunee to the ACC, we’ll have the landowner’s responsibility for all preexisting conditions on the property.”

  Ed’s knife cut more delicately now, as he teased the tail off. “You mean if one of them contractors of yours trips over a sticking-up board, he can sue you?” He tossed the tail onto the frost-scarred grass.
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  “Basically, yeah. But we’re thinking here of a particular liability. Your machinery.”

  Her father straightened. “Whaddya mean, my machinery?”

  “Didn’t you leave Castle Logging’s machinery near your cutting site when you shut down last spring?”

  “Course I did. You know that. Why the hell should I pay a couple thousand to garage the skidders and pickers in some truck depot when I can keep ’em for free on the van der Hoevens’ land? They’re on one of the access roads. They’re not in anybody’s way—any hikers come through, they can waltz right past ’em.”

  “That’s just it, Dad. Anybody can reach them. And as of tomorrow, if your equipment is stolen or vandalized, you could conceivably hold the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation liable as landholder.”

  He flung the knife into the earth. It stuck deep in the ground, quivering with a violence to match his voice.

  “I could ‘conceivably hold’ you liable? What the hell kind of man do you think I am? I’ve stored my machines on Haudenosaunee land for more’n a decade without a single problem or a complaint from the van der Hoevens! I suppose you want me to move ’em all off the sacred property before sundown.”

  “You may never have had a problem, and I hope you never do! But that won’t let us off the hook with our insurer if we don’t take care of the details. I’m not asking you to move the skidders. I just want an inventory of what’s on the land and some proof of your insurance.”

  “To save your butts if somebody decides to blow up one of my trucks.”

  “Cut me a break, Dad. This is for your protection as well as for the ACC’s. What if something did happen to one of the pickers or skidders or trucks before you could sell them? Would you really want to be stuck in court, your insurance company fighting ours?”

  He looked at her suspiciously. “Why’d you say I’d be selling the machinery? Who told you that?”

  Becky blew out an exasperated breath. “Bonnie, of course. You are planning to sell, right? She said you didn’t want to try to keep the business going if you had to travel up north for the timber.”

  “I’ll be selling, all right. You’ve seen to that.”

  “Oh, for God’s sakes!” She actually stamped her foot, a gesture she thought she had left behind with her childhood. “Just give me an inventory!”

  “You want to count my machines and find out if there’re any dings in ’em, missy, you can go out in the woods and do it yourself! They’re on fire road number 52. Have a good time communing with nature while you’re there.”

  “And the insurance?” she gritted out.

  “Eugene van der Hoeven has a copy of the current policy. I’m sure he’ll be happy to hand it over to you, since he won’t need it come tomorrow.”

  “Van der Hoeven has a copy!” She pointed a finger at him. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, giving me that ‘what kind of man do you think I am’ line. The ACC isn’t asking anything more from you than what you were already giving the van der Hoevens.”

  “There’s one difference, missy.” He leaned in so close she could smell the iron-and-earth scent of raw meat and blood. “With the van der Hoevens, it was give-and-take. With your crew, I’m bending over and taking it. And I don’t like it.”

  11:00 A.M.

  There was no place for Randy to park at the Castles’. The old man’s SUV was pulled up by the barnlike garage, and the rest of the short driveway was occupied by one of those experimental gas-electric hybrids Randy had read about but never seen. He looked around. Technically, there wasn’t any on-street parking allowed on Sherman Street, but he figured no one would complain if he pulled his bike up close enough to the Castles’ drive.

  He dismounted and hung his helmet on the back. He walked up the drive and was about to mount the stairs to the house when he heard the faint sounds of voices coming from behind the garage. He headed past Ed’s SUV toward the noise.

  “Fine!” A woman shouted. “Fine! I’ll go get it myself!”

  “Good!” That was Ed; Randy had heard him roaring too often before not to know his voice. “Maybe if you actually have to work for something instead of gettin’ it out of a book, you’ll appreciate it more!”

  Randy rounded the corner of the garage. The first thing he saw was the bloody skinned deer dangling from a homemade frame. The next thing that caught his eye was his employer—his former employer—nose to nose with a fine-boned blonde who looked like Ed with all the ugly and old squeezed out of him.

  “I am not staying here with a man who can’t respect my choices!” She whirled away from the old man. The fact that Randy was in her way didn’t even slow her down. He jumped to one side, and she glared at him as she swept past.

  “Nobody’s holding you here at gunpoint!” Ed yelled after her. Randy doubted she heard; the thunder of her boots as she stomped up the back stairs drowned out any other sound.

  Ed made a noise in the back of his throat. He glared at Randy in exactly the same way the girl had. “Don’t ever have daughters,” he snarled.

  “Okay.” Whatever. Randy was prepared to agree to almost anything if the old man’d give him a listen.

  Ed bent over and wrenched a knife out of the ground. He wiped it against his leg, then laid it neatly next to several other knives and saws on a piece of cardboard. He picked up a hacksaw. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was thinking about this plan of yours, selling off the business.”

  Ed took one of the deer’s front legs and drew it up, resting the hoof and first joint against his coverall-clad thigh. He raised the hacksaw. “Look. Like I told you when I called you yesterday, I’m sorry to have to pull the rug out from underneath you. As soon as you talk to someone else about a job, you have ’em call me. I’ll give you a good recommendation.” Ed began sawing off the deer’s leg above the knee joint.

  “No, that’s not it. I was thinking, what if, like, the guys and I took over the business from you?” Randy spoke loudly, over the wet grinding sound of the hacksaw blade chewing through bone. “I know you’re tired of the work and all, but me and the other guys on the crew, we’re still young enough to make it work.”

  Ed laughed shortly. “You’re a good logger, Randy, but you’re a long way from being a businessman. Take my advice. Head up north and find an outfit that needs extra hands for the winter.”

  “I don’t wanna go up north. I wanna work near home. C’mon, Ed, give me a chance.”

  “You think you can run a timber operation, fine. You come up with two hundred thousand and I’ll sell you the business, lock, stock, and skidder.” With a wrenching crack, the deer’s lower leg snapped. Ed sliced through the remaining string of tendon and hide and tossed the mutilated limb next to the hide and tail piled on the ground. He stretched, cracking his back, and looked at the corpse with satisfaction.

  “Two hundred thousand?” Randy could barely get the sum out.

  “That’s what my trucks and skidders are worth, fair market value.” Ed grabbed the deer’s last remaining leg and slapped it against his thigh. “And that’s just the start of what you’ll have to lay out. There’s money to insure your equipment, and money for fuel, and money for the men, and money for the licenses.”

  Randy was still getting his brain around the cost of Ed’s beat-up old machines. “Maybe we could work something out,” he said. “Like, I could have the use of the machines and pay you back out of what I earn.”

  Ed sawed into the long, thin leg. Randy watched as hair, skin, meat, and muscle severed and the blade bit into bone. “Kid, cutting a deal like that would be robbing both of us. I’d wind up with no money for my retirement, and you’d wind up broke and in the hole.” Ed shook his head, his eyes on the steady back-and-forth of his saw. “Even if you could run a timber business, getting hold of my machines wouldn’t help you out if you want to stay put in Millers Kill. I know I seem like Methuselah to you, but I’m not selling up ’cause I’m too old. I’m selling out because there ain’t any more logging in this
area.” The second foreleg broke away. Ed stood and tossed it into the growing pile of body parts.

  “Once Haudenosaunee’s gone, that’s it. Next available woodlot’s another fifty miles to the north, if you can get a license. And that’ll be closed to logging as soon as the landowners get a big enough offer from the developers.” He wiped the saw on his coveralls and laid it on the cardboard. “Pretty soon, the only outfits making money off the woods’ll be the big guys. You want a job? Go on over to the new resort and talk to the big shots from GWP. They’re gonna be the only game in town.”

  “But if I just had the equipment, just, like, one skidder and a truck, I could—”

  Ed unfolded a length of rough sacking and draped it over the frame, enclosing the deer. “Randy. You’re not listening to what I been saying. A skidder and a truck isn’t going to get you anywheres.” He unspooled twine from a ball and, gathering the bottom of the fabric together, looped it several times around, a makeshift body bag. He straightened, groaning, and tossed the twine ball onto the cardboard. “Now if you don’t mind, I got a date with a couple ibuprophen and a long, hot shower.”

  Randy tagged after him as he crossed the yard to the back steps. Ed paused. “Look, kid. I was born and raised in Washington County. I never wanted to leave it. So I’ve outlived all the decent jobs—that’s not a tragedy for me. I’m old enough to retire and spend the rest of my years hunting and hanging out with my grandsons.” He settled his hand on Randy’s shoulder, as weighty as time itself. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is the only place in the world you can be happy. Huh? Okay?” He vanished into the house.