"When will the time be right for getting out to the farm and getting to work?" Mac asked, wondering if he should get in line with the other newsmen shivering before the knifelike wind cutting down from the north. His editor, too, would have to be sent a dispatch.
"The men of the press have been promised that later this afternoon a fleet of buckboards will arrive to convey us to the site. There, en masse, we will have our opportunity to interview the prisoners. The process will be repeated tomorrow for the execution itself." Charlie's blithe delivery let Mac know that any of the reporter's hopes of obtaining an exclusive had been dashed and that Charlie had decided to make the best of it. "In the meantime, why don't we get you settled? You're really lucky. I was one of the first to arrive and I actually got a room to myself at the hotel. You can flop with me. We'll split the cost. You'll have to pay a little extra besides for a cot, but at least you won't be spending the night on a horsehair settee in the lobby, like most of those guys." Charlie jerked his head over his shoulder at the line at the railroad station, now well behind them.
They had walked halfway through the town, which consisted of at most fifteen buildings: the railroad station at one end, a stable with a livestock auction yard, saloon, mercantile store, constabulary with blinds drawn and a "closed" sign hanging on the front door, a tiny bank, various houses and small offices, and a hotel at the other end.
"Thanks, that's kind of you," Mac said. Charlie's kindness was probably not altogether altruistic. He'd undoubtedly already drawn up the paperwork with the hotel manager in readiness to submit to his editor. Mac would pay half the room's rent, but Charlie would be reimbursed for the whole amount.
Mac didn't mind. In a few hours, with the town filling up as it was, he'd be lucky to pay half again that amount for the privilege of a bad night's sleep on one of the sofas Charlie had referred to, in a lobby overflowing with other snoring, probably drunk newsmen. This way he'd have some privacy, a little room to spread out his drawing materials, and only one other snoring, probably drunk newsman to contend with — Charlie.
And a little room it turned out to be. Mac guessed that one of the hotel employees had been evicted for the duration and ordered to take up residence in the stables. The hotel manager was not happy to be cut out of the opportunity to double-bill for the tiny space. He tried to cut his losses by charging an intolerable fee for the cot. Mac pointed out that he'd be almost as comfortable lying on his coat on the floor, and the man finally brought his price down to the merely outrageous.
Charlie went off with the manager, ostensibly to make sure Mac's cot got delivered but more likely to nail down a supply of liquor for the evening.
Mac spread out his supplies on Charlie's bed, checking to make sure that his pens were all clean, then bundled up and went back outside. He sent a wire off to his desk editor apprising him of the situation and finished three highly detailed drawings of the closed jail before the wagons finally arrived.
Three buckboards had been provided, driven by farmers as weathered and splinter-harsh as their wagons. The newsmen clambered on board, billfolds coming out as soon as they settled. This ride, too, would cost dear. For the money, the farmers had made at least a minimal effort for their comfort; planks nailed to crates provided crude seats. Charlie hopped up alongside Mac, wedging him against the side. "Got your cot set up," he said, with a grin.
Mac raised his eyebrows. "Wouldn't happen to be any, uh, beverages stored under it?"
Charlie's grin widened. "Amazing how this newspaper business works up a powerful thirst in a man," he said.
They passed two churches on the outskirts of town, and a little further on a one-room schoolhouse. Children's faces could be seen like shadows pressed up against its sooty windows. Mac bet that they'd never seen such a large gathering of bowlered besuited men before.
Some miles later Charlie pointed out a sinuous mound too low to be called an honest hill. "Look at that. This area is rife with barrows. This was supposed to be a 'long life' region, so there were lots of Injun settlements here about. Most of the mounds are shaped like turtles, the farmers say. But they're small, not much to look at. Not like the Great Serpent mound. That one is supposed to be enormous.
"I tell you, Mac, those Injuns knew things we're just beginning to figure out. Instead of an Adam-and-Eve-evil-serpent legend to have to buy into, they could really see snakes for what they have to teach us — as skin-shedders, as models for transformation." Charlie gave a lighthearted sigh. "I'd really like to go see that Serpent mound. And someday I will."
Scratch Charlie's initial veneer of a good-time Joe and the next layer exposed a man who would defend a friend's honor to the death. Scratch that surface and you found a Charlie who would cheerfully dupe that same friend for the shirt off his back. Scratch deeply past that and you started hitting the layers of a mystic, starting with a humorous, almost cynical facade, then descending down to levels profoundly spiritual.
"So where is this serpent mound of yours, Charlie?"
"South and west from here, near a town called Peebles."
The name Peebles was vaguely familiar, but Mac couldn't remember why.
"The Greeks understood these things too. Remember the 'Worm Ourobourus'? The snake in a circle devouring its own tail? Always new, yet always the same thing. Just like us, huh?"
"Charlie, you talking about snakes again?" The man sitting on the other side of Charlie shook his head. "You are a sick, sick man if you find any good in those varmints."
"I concede as how I might be sick, but the reason's got nothing to do with serpents." Charlie pulled a flask out from inside his vest, took a long swig from it and handed it to the other man. "Here, John, this will relax that dour mug of yours."
Other reporters had turned around at the sound of the flask being popped. They reached across for a pull. With a single comparison of snakes to the murderous Erickson brothers, the conversation switched to the upcoming lynching.
Mac, not supple at small talk and uninterested in drinking, eventually stopped listening. Unable to sketch on the jouncing buckboard, he studied the passing landscape with as keen an eye as if he were drawing it. He noted, as the others did not, the roundabout route the farmers were taking.
They had turned, turned and turned again. Mac guessed that if they continued more or less straight now they would soon cross the road they'd left town on, at an innocuous intersection some ways before the turtle mound.
Sure enough, there was the crossroad. Mac, amused, said nothing to the others. If the locals wanted to ensure that intrepid newsmen would be unable to find their way back later that night for an exclusive, who was he to fault their ingenuity?
The convoy crossed the earlier road, went a ways, then took another turn. Now they were traveling parallel to their original route; there was the back side of the turtle barrow. Charlie emerged from a pull on the flask long enough to notice. "Look, Mac, there's another mound. I told you they were all over."
Mac smiled and nodded. He thought of how it was like so many other things in life — something that seemed completely different was actually just the back side of the same old thing.
The locals finally tired of their game and let the cavalcade arrive. They rounded a curve, dropped down into a hollow and saw the farm. The farm house was small and tidy, the barn spacious — a well-kept place, but lacking any signs of spring preparation. The fields hadn't been harrowed. Fruit trees flanking the house had not been pruned yet. The place looked as though it was outfitted for a modest dairy and cheese operation, but there was a curious lack of cattle, in spite of a plentitude of old cowpies. Several bewildered-looking horses nickered at the fence.
Heavily armed farmers met the wagon at the top of the road. More were guarding the barn. The newsmen eyed them. Before the buckboards stopped bounding the reporters had all begun scribbling notes on local color. The farmers — worn, gray, smart — stared back, clearly aware that they were just entertainment to these city folks. Mac was sure they found the re
porters equally entertaining.
One of the oldest farmers herded the newspapermen together in front of the barn. Some of the men, including Mac, rolled over empty milk cans to sit on. The photographers set up their cameras and prepared their plates.
Mac positioned himself in front, close to the old farmer, so that even sitting and drawing he could see. "Where are the cows?" he asked the old man.
"What?"
"The cows." Mac pointed to the ground, to the dried, flaking cowchips.
The farmer looked at him with surprise and some respect. "Dead. That's the why and when of catching these boys. They'd kept Zeke and Jacob alive for nigh on two months, during snowbounding. When the ground started warming they killed and buried them. Come the last few weeks, they couldn't cope with calving and milking." He smiled grimly. "The boys are lumberjacks. The cows must have 'bout driven them crazy. So they run them all over the edge of an old quarry over the hill there," he pointed. "You could see the buzzards when we went and saw them cows smashed up on the rocks. Lumberjacks. Dumb lumberjacks."
Zeke was Hezekiah Schuman, the farm's owner, Mac already knew. "Who's Jacob?" he asked.
The farmer spit a red-brown stream of tobacco juice and nodded to a burly man with a shotgun hoisted over his shoulder. "Samuel Litton over there — his youngest boy. Nice young fella; a hard worker, but a little tetched in the head, a little simple. He'd never have been able to run a place himself, so Samuel and his other sons lent him out to Zeke, who surely needed the help bad after his wife died."
"Zeke had no children?"
"One boy who died young. A daughter married and living in Youngstown. When this is over I'm sure she'll sell the place."
The barn doors opened. A small mob of farmers half pushed, half dragged two chained young men out. Their silver blond hair reminded Mac of the juggler, Whitey. But when they lifted their sullen, closed faces to look at the press, their resemblance to Mac's brother Arthur was shocking. There were no marks on their faces, but the way they hunched over and stumbled Mac guessed that the locals had been questioning them the hard way, gaining extra revenge in advance of the hanging. Two crates were pulled up and the murderers shoved onto them. The other reporters began shouting questions at the brothers. Why did they do it? Did they really think they'd get away with it? Where were they from? What did their mother think of them? Photographers ducked behind their cloths and bitter-smelling powder flashed as they shot their pictures.
Mac sketched the inquisition with shaking hands, scribbling the other correspondents' questions in the margins of his drawings. He knew, too well, the look on the outlaws' faces. The newsmen would get little more out of them than his family had ever gotten out of Arthur. These were men who had turned their backs on the world.
Asked why they'd begun a life of crime, one of them muttered, "no work." They gave their names as Jon and Lars. Asked why they'd killed Hezekiah and Jacob, Lars shrugged. Asked where they'd hidden the loot from all their robberies, they both just curled the edge of one lip. Since they were facing away from each other at the time, the effect was eerie, as if they were one person with two bodies.
Not much to build a story on. Mac knew how each of the other newsmen would write their copy. Several would call the brothers desperadoes and liken them to the James boys. Charlie would use the Vikings-run-amok theme.
The brothers looked distracted by physical pain, bored with the proceedings, uninterested in furthering anyone's fortunes or futures other than their own, and they obviously knew they had no future. Finally they stopped responding altogether. The farmers abruptly ended the interview and bundled the protesting newsmen back in the buckboards.
Returning to town took even longer than getting out. The farmers took a different, even more tortuous route. This time some of the reporters paid attention, undoubtedly with the idea of trying to make their way back on their own later. Mac appreciated the farmers' intelligence. It was harder to visualize a route coming backwards than forwards. The more experienced newsmen knew they'd been lazy and had been foxed. They looked off into space, probably imagining a fancy narrative to cover the lack of facts, then scribbled busily against the lurching of the wagons.
The reporters went into high gear for a short while after unloading at Logan. The line at the telegraph office telescoped again, newsmen hunched protectively over their notes in the lobby. A few of the inexperienced and foolish disappeared, as expected. From the window in their room Charlie watched the novices sneak away. He winked at Mac before taking off to join the telegraph tarriers. "Those silly bastards are going to come back miserable and cold and needing a good, hot drink. But probably too late for even that." In March the days were still short. Night was already falling.
Mac smiled vaguely from his cot and dove into his sketches, recopying them, fleshing them out. If he wanted to, if he felt it was worth it, if he felt up to the effort of bribing a local for some bony, swaybacked mule, he could find his way to the farm easily. He shivered. For what? To face twin pairs of blank, angry eyes, no words behind them, only muted rage? The brothers wouldn't share their lives and their secrets. Or worse, maybe they would. Mac felt suddenly nauseated. He hid from his thoughts in a savage flurry of drawing: the barn, already showing signs of neglect, the animal-silent meadows, the churlish, laconic brothers seated side by side.
The dinner bell startled him. With relief he walked down the stairs. The hotel had stretched for the occasion, setting up temporary tables of long boards on sawhorses in the small dining room. Mac and Charlie got to eat in the first shift. Dinner was a stew of pork mixed with root vegetables that tasted of being stored in the cellar since October. The fresh hot corn bread, thankfully, was as good as any from home.
Feeding done, they joined their compatriots in the lobby, which had already been turned into a dormitory of sorts. The scratchy dusty horsehair sofas were pulled close together, rented blankets tossed carelessly over them. Rickety chairs had been commandeered from local homes.
A poker game was already in play, cozily gathered around a case of whiskey. As Mac and Charlie settled into the game the saloon owner from down the street showed up with a few more bottles.
Later, in the fit of generosity that was his custom, Charlie would bring down some of his own booze to share with the crowd. All in all, the drinking would be moderate. The reporters were cagey enough to want to be alert for the lynching on the morrow. A photographer from Columbus piled the bottles in an elaborate arrangement designed to force them to retain sufficient soberness to extricate the whiskey safely.
"As my dear grandmother used to tell me, only drink enough to free the creative juices," another reporter from Dayton said as he picked up the cards dealt to him.
Mac wasn't much for drinking. His creative juices were already abundantly free — he had more energy and imagination than any two men put together. He played a few hands to help get the game going. Once everyone had been processed through dinner and filtered into the lobby he settled down to draw caricatures of his fellow reporters.
"Round and round, round and round. Deal those cards. What goes around comes around again, time after time," Charlie muttered to his cards.
"What goes around better not come around again," the dealer, the photographer from Columbus, exclaimed. "Leastwise not till I shuffle the cards again."
"Some things that go around don't come around again. Like Jon and Lars," an onlooker snickered.
"Au contraire," Charlie said loftily. "They most assuredly will. If ever I've seen two individuals in need of a repeat performance, it's those two. They get my vote for most likely to reincarnate."
The dealer twitched a card at him. Charlie shook his head and folded his hands on his cards, standing pat. "In fact, think about their appearance, their demeanor. I would say that they are actually simultaneous reincarnations of each other."
"You Masons!" the other reporter from Dayton scoffed. "Your usual mumbo jumbo is bad enough, but simultaneous reincarnations? Don't pour that man another gla
ss. He's already had enough!"
Charlie raked in the change from the hand he'd just won, then he riffled the pack of cards. Mac sketched him fancy-shuffling the deck through a haze of cigar smoke. In the drawing his friend looked like a latter-day Mephistopheles.
"It's not such a far-fetched notion," Charlie said, slapping down cards around the circle. "Why should reincarnation be merely linear? You borrow a little from this person, they borrow a little from you, and none the wiser. It probably happens all the time. You wouldn't even know that you had done it or had it done to you, unless you had the sensitivity of special training."
A couple of other Masons grinned behind their cards, then nodded solemnly.
Mac felt uneasy. Is this what Arthur meant when he accused Mac of stealing his life from him? In the drawing the lines composing Charlie's face became sharp and dangerous.
"Our Erickson boys are a special case, however. I believe that due to the confused, intertwined state of their current incarnation that they have suffered an incomplete break with their past lives. Their wandering, marauding behavior of the last six months indicates they've confused themselves with their Viking ancestors. Either that, or they couldn't stand another Minnesota winter." Charlie winked at Mac.
The room laughed.
"That's a load of bull," the man said. "You ask me, those boys didn't look like nothing but stupid."
Charlie waggled a finger at his victim. "No, my good man, not stupid. Those two are like gods; unfeeling Elementals around whom anything might occur. What you think to be a lack of intelligence is in fact a lack of affect, the indifference of divinity, an ignorance of human emotions."
Ah, Sweet mystery Of Life Page 3