by Robert Stone
“Hey,” Shelby called over her shoulder, “think maybe Mrs. Brookman ran Maud over?”
Salmone made a note to visit Jo Carr in counseling.
22
“I SAW THIS COMING.”
Brookman stopped pacing and clenched his fists in pain.
“Please, sweetheart.”
“No, I’m sorry, we have to live this out. I saw it.”
“I ought not to be in this house at all,” Brookman said.
“It’s your house. And I’m your wife. Did you love her?”
“Did I love her?”
Can it be, he wondered, that I don’t know what love is? But the fact was he had thought about it before. He had no answers, as was often the case. So he stood there in the room that had been contaminated for them by his treachery and tried to figure it out.
He had loved Maud as a woman, for her woman’s body, as a person, for her human body. For her spirit, for her intelligence and courage. Person, body, intellect and will. He had even nourished a certain affection for her lack of judgment. Say it was for her youth and courage. She was not a child but in a way he had loved her as a child, as a daughter, a younger sister. He had loved her in all the ways that were supposed to be right and in ways that were wrong. He had not loved her in the all-consuming way in which he loved his wife or in the way he would love his children.
“No,” he said.
“You did her great wrong,” Ellie said. “I wonder what will happen to us now.”
He said nothing.
“Let me tell you something strange,” Ellie said to him.
He kept the liquor in a cabinet behind the piano in the quietly grand main room. For years he had resolved to move it somewhere else. Sophia practiced for hours every afternoon, and the sight of him hauling out a bottle of Dewar’s past the pale small form of Sophia engaged in The Well-Tempered Clavier annoyed Ellie for reasons she herself could not have explained. Now, with Sophia safely in school, he fetched it out of the cabinet and poured himself a snifter.
“Tell me.”
Her eyes took on the brightened gaze they sometimes held, a look Brookman secretly thought of as a glint of madness. “Glint of madness” because there were instances of what was apparently schizophrenia in her family, as there were many heritable diseases among the groups around White Lake.
“Last month while I was home, I first took the notion I was pregnant. I was almost sure. I was going to tell Mama. I was going to tell you.”
They sat on a leather sofa, Ellie sliding to the far end from him.
“You didn’t say anything,” he said.
“Didn’t want to jinx it. Anyway, I felt well. I thought I’d go along on a field trip over the mountains—across the Clears—with Nancy Gumm and two elders. We knew a norther was coming but I thought it was OK.”
She meant the elders of her church, and Nancy Gumm was an ethnologist from Victoria. Brookman had not known. The storms were considerable this year.
“We were snowed in. Across the Clears. There are two families of our Christians there because years ago a madman brought their parents there. A man named Gross broke from the Old Synod. Think of Dürer. Think of Münster. They live with the Diné band there. There wasn’t a winter road before drilling farther south. Old people remember before the money economy. Holiness Mennonites. Medieval. They live with the Carrier band there. The Diné. The native, the Indian band, the Carriers. No winter road.
“Nancy Gumm wanted to record. Because their songs are the oldest and the deepest in the north. And our folks who went and lived with them kept their songs going. And they sing and tell as though it were before Boas, that stupid man . . . The Christian children do the same. They think in Carrier language, eh?”
She had been upset since the night of Maud’s death but she seemed suddenly in the grip of something overwhelming.
“Did something bad happen there?”
She paid no attention to his question.
Ellie Brookman knew hundreds of Indian story-song performances. Teasing her, Brookman once told her it was like Comrade Zhdanov claiming to know two thousand Russian folktales, except that Ellie really knew the songs. Rarely did she talk about them with Brookman or anyone else. She might tell one narrative to him, or to people at a party, and she could make it funny, repulsive to the gentle ear, ironic.
But she knew people rolled their eyes heavenward if she so much as mentioned Indian tales. Once Brookman, flattering her, said, “You have a way with those stories, El. You get the point.” This he intended as a joke. She would have told the stories in an absolutely white person’s way, the humor and ironies and so forth completely changed for white people’s perception. But she herself had learned to understand them in the intended native way. She would privately think: I won’t be more of a fool than they think me now. Brookman and everyone else, she knew quite well, found the tales boring and pointless. Perverse at their most interesting, material for the many able parodists around.
Funny, she would think, how the despised Longfellow had done it best, using the rhythms of the Kalevala. It was all more different than people could imagine, and even she herself, until that winter, had not really known. But the mad Hutterite who took his pilgrims to the Clears had known.
“I would like to have some of your drink,” Ellie told Brookman, “but I’m pregnant because you’re so wonderful.” She grinned and disappeared behind her eyes again.
“The midwinter time coming up, the midwinter ceremony. Darkness, darkness. Huge piles of birch, elder. Some they must have got at Bay Shopping Center a thousand miles away, hauled it in. Isn’t that ironic, eh, but that’s the life of the north, the bush. There are no ironies there. There’s nothing but irony there. That’s what the tales are all about. But the ceremony when the light goes, it will be gone for what, fifteen hours? The storm’s trapped us and my thought is, I’m pregnant. I have to take care.
“Thank God Sophia was back at White Lake. Someone was singing a song about Coyote and I started to shake. Darkness all around. I thought I saw Coyote.”
Ever so slightly she changed the angle of her strange, unfocused-seeming gaze and held him fixed.
“Coyote singing, ‘Child will die, Elsa.’ I thought: My land, we’re fucked, eh? I thought we’ll lose the child. But I didn’t. No. Maud died instead. Ya. So I saw it coming.”
Brookman finished his drink.
“Don’t think I couldn’t go into the bush and my cousins couldn’t help me put up a cabin in a week,” Ellie told him. “I could live there for the rest of my life. Never see you, never see anything but crows. Not man, woman, but stars and night and jack pine and I would still be your wife, do you understand?”
“Yes, baby,” he said. “I understand.” She was returning from the touch of transport, coming back to him.
“But I think I will not do that. And since you are here, you might do me the courtesy of staying.”
“Every night of my life, Ellie.”
“And days too, right? Mornings? Afternoons?”
“Day and night, Ellie. Yes, baby,” he said. “I understand. But we’re safe from that now.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I wish I could have a drink, but no way can I do that, right?”
“You’re so right.”
“Yes,” she said. “You and me and God in heaven and the wonders of modern medicine can keep us pretty safe from that now. Don’t do it to me again.”
23
“I WAS VERY, VERY FOND OF MAUD,” Jo Carr told Lieutenant Salmone. “I can tell you I’m in mourning for her. I was with her the night she died. For God’s sake, find the person in that car.”
He could see that she was very shaky but holding on. Holding on very well.
“You took her to the hospital, I understand.”
“I took her to the hospital. I was told she left right away. I didn’t try hard enough to find her. I let her wander off.”
“Dr. Carr, you shouldn’t feel that way, in my opinion. You did a lot more than your job.”
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“I let her wander off in a lot of ways.”
“What could you do you didn’t do?”
“Lieutenant, I like to think I can do a lot of things when I put my mind to it. You ask what I could have done? I don’t know.”
There was a box of tissues on the corner of her desk and he wondered whether she would make use of it herself.
“You know,” she said, “I’d like to have a buck for every parent that ever came in here and said that to me. Myself, I never had any children of my own.”
“I’m very sorry,” Salmone said.
“Oh, it wasn’t done, Lieutenant. I would have been the pregnant nun in the old joke—you get extra points for running her over.”
“I meant I was sorry for your grief, Doctor.”
“Right. Excuse me.”
“Would you say Maud confided in you?”
“I couldn’t exactly say that. For one thing, she wasn’t terribly confiding. In her freshman year it might have been true.”
“Not after that?”
“After that, hardly at all. But I believe I understood her. I felt I knew her well. Just intangibles. I know generally what’s been up with her through other students affected by her life.”
“You mean Shelby Magoffin?”
“Yes. You could talk to Shelby.”
“We did. Anybody else?”
“Shelby, being her roommate, was the student closest to her I know about.”
“She had a bad romance with Professor Brookman?”
“You might say that. Why are you asking me this?”
He told her about the scene on the street.
“They were shoving each other.”
“Wait a minute, Lieutenant. Don’t we suspect murder by an anti-abortion fanatic?”
“That’s our leading possibility.”
“What’s it got to do with Professor Brookman?”
“We have to factor in everything.”
Jo was silent for a moment.
“So she had a bad romance with Brookman. Understand this: Maud did not go in for romances. She was like the unobtainable girl and she broke their hearts. Some of them—in this place I think it was their first rejection. The boys, the alpha boys too, really went for her. And to speak for Brookman—as a married seducer—there were plenty worse. Or better at it. Or more compulsive. Maud was smart as could be. Beautiful, smart as could be . . .”
She stopped and looked at him. It was all he could do not to slide her the box of tissues. When she came around, he took one and wiped his glasses with it.
“Why are you asking me about Brookman?”
“I have to ask you, ma’am. So she thought maybe he would leave Mrs. Brookman?”
“I don’t know about that. I know she thought it was love. Love love. She thought he adored her. He didn’t talk about his family to her. She didn’t know how married he was. How sort of devoted he was. She was quite young, she was self-absorbed. He’s smart and attractive and traveled, and she thought he was hers.”
“Permanently?”
“Oh,” Jo said, “permanently? This was a kid. Forever and a day. Fairy tale. Vain. Aging, adoring parents. An A student here. Of course the mother passed away.”
“Tell me about Brookman.”
“They used to say about Brookman he was a polished thug. A very decent, likable guy in most ways. A boozy opportunist, not enough thought for the morrow, a very intelligent wife who loved him a whole lot and was from a stand-up-for-your-man tradition.”
“Do you think he would hurt Maud?”
“No! Do you?”
“I don’t know,” Salmone said flatly.
“Frankly, I’d like to know why I’m being asked so much about him.”
“Because of the way it happened. Why do you say Mr. Brookman is a thug?”
“That’s entirely the wrong word,” Jo said. “People used to say that as a joke.”
“Yes?”
Suddenly she thought of El Doliente and her dream of him.
“It’s funny,” she said. “I should mention this priest I used to know in South America. He showed up here during the hassles that followed Maud’s Gazette article. He came to see me. He’s something of an anti-abortion crusader.”
“He came here? To the counseling office?”
“He was called Father Walter. Down there we used noms de guerre. I mean we used just first names. Because it was dangerous.”
Salmone wrote down what she gave him.
“Did he ask about Maud?”
“Yes. Everybody was all about poor Maud.”
“Did he threaten her? Did he seem rational?”
“Frankly, I found him frightening.”
“How so?”
“He was intense. I was frightened of him when I knew him years ago. He was a revolutionary. I guess I was too.”
“South America this was?”
“Yeah. I think he might have been traveling with some Peruvian or Bolivian kids raising money.”
“Father Walter,” Salmone said. “We’ll check him out. Did you say he threatened Maud?”
“No. But he asked about her. The night she died I had a dream about him. A very frightening dream.”
“He scared you?”
“In the dream he did.”
“We’ll check him out if we can.”
“I guess I was always scared of him,” Jo said.
“Yeah, well,” said Salmone, “some priests are like that. I think there were a lot of priests and ministers up here after that piece came out.”
When Salmone was gone, Jo leaned on her desk looking down at its worn surface. Since when, she had to ask herself, do you use the cops as your friends and confidants? Not that she had anything against Salmone, whom she had encountered at least once before. The fixation on Brookman was puzzling and disturbing. She had spoken thoughtlessly and the detective’s reaction was downright predatory. Were they going to scapegoat Brookman to cool the issue? No, she thought, surely that notion was just the ghost of her old activist conditioning. She hoped! But what had Brookman done? What had really happened? She had prattled on so thoughtlessly. It was taking place, and in a vacuum too, because the incident was so strange and shocking that partisan reaction was astonished and unformed. The week’s Gazette had “ASK QUESTIONS!” on its front page as an editorial. Jo felt on her own with Maud’s death.
She had already written and mailed a note of sympathy to Edward Stack. But since she had spoken with Stack the night of Maud’s death, she decided to call him about arrangements.
He answered gruffly, as she expected. She reintroduced herself.
“I wondered how you were, Mr. Stack. If there was any way we could help?”
“They told me she’s coming home,” he said. “I want to put her with her mother.”
“Yes. Well, look, would you please let us know about services? Anything that’s not strictly family where we could say goodbye to her. People here loved and admired her.”
“I heard.”
Jo let that one pass.
“Some of us would like to . . . maybe say one for her. If there’s a way. We’d like to remember her. Honor her.”
“Yeah. I don’t think she would want any church stuff. Just to be in the church where her mother is now. That would be it.”
She waited for him to say more but he seemed to be finished.
“They told me she was coming home,” he said again.
“I’ll make sure of that, Mr. Stack.”
“Hey, maybe I should make a contribution to you people. Maybe I should endow a girl’s hockey stick. A lacrosse net.”
“Mr. Stack,” she said, “please stay in touch. Let us be here for you in any way we can. Do call me and let me know how you are.”
She decided to call Lieutenant Salmone and ask about Maud’s going home.
24
SALMONE HAD NOT HAD a call back from Eddie Stack, so he made another call of his own. He had thought a lot about it.
“I been t
hinking more and more we should sit down, Eddie. They must have told you this is a homicide one way or another. It may be involuntary, but it could be deliberate. Things I need to know.”
“You don’t have the driver?”
“We don’t. You know how it is up here, the Staties doing that. They’re checking out stops that night but, you know, it’s incomplete.”
“Yeah.”
“She was drinking, Eddie. Kid drinking, you know? I’m really sorry—Maud and this Brookman, they were both drinking.”
“I know about fucking Brookman. Brookman cut her loose. She was out of her mind.”
“We’re running down Brookman.”
“The fuck is married. He’s gotta be married, right?”
“Yeah, he’s married. His wife is out there when it happens. She’s fucking pregnant. They’re in front of his house. You heard that?”
“No. Not about the house. Sal? I gotta see you, man. I’ll come up.”
“If you could.”
“You’re working, Sal, I know that. I can do it.”
“If you could, Eddie. It would be the best, I think, and soon, know what I mean? And us, we’ll sit down quietly.”
“Something I have to do first. I have to put Maud with her mother.”
“That’s good, Eddie. I’m so sorry. Call me and we’ll talk.”
25
AS JOHN CLAMMER DROVE THROUGH the deep woods, the sound of his sickly engine raised inquiring lights and groans in houses off the road. This was the accursed national forest famous for its tangled kudzu, its meth reek and the outlaw lives played out on the pulses of the strong, the failing and the weak among its inhabitants. No one had been meant to actually live there.
Of that place an arguably wise man once said: “This here is the Sherwood Forest. This here is the fucking Hole in the Wall where none but the strongest minds and wills fucking prevail in.”
John drove to the Church of the Savior, where the U.S. government’s road met the county highway, a neat assembly of metallic prefabs. There was a less neat double-wide positioned beside it where Dr. Russell Fumes, the church’s pastor, lived with his young wife. The cleric’s wife was not at home for John Clammer’s visit, but Fumes himself was awake in bed, made uneasy by the sound of Clammer parking his vehicle.