by Rich Foster
Cast the First Stone
A Red Lake Book
Cast the First Stone
by
Rich Foster
Copyright © 2012 by Richard A Foster
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.
First Edition: September 2012
Printed in the United States of America
Chapter One
As the first hint of dawn tinged the eastern sky, men long on hope and short on money came for the Canaan County Auction. A crowd gathered. They wore denim jackets above faded jeans, or cowboy boots and fleece collared suede coats. They were men of the tilled field and the open range, tough weather beaten survivors. Their skin was leathery and eyes furrowed with crow’s feet by years beneath the western sun. Calloused and raw knuckled hands bore witness to years of raw work.
The men hunkered together against the morning chill like domesticated field animals. Ranchers and farmers chatted in segregated circles. The range wars were long over yet the differences and animosities endured. A hundred years later they still had little to say to each other.
A few men passed around a flask, chasing “the hair of the dog.” Some sipped to be social. Others drank to dull the edge of a hangover, nipping at them. Almost all sipped cups of steamy coffee. Men talked and chewed tobacco, spitting the toxic juice into the weeds. Others sucked on cigarettes. The clouds of smoke hanging around them like a cold breath in winter.
The sun inched above the distant horizon, filtered by the pines beyond the county work yard. A short time later the gates swung open. The men moved forward in mass like a herd of cattle.
They came into the yard in search of a “deal.” Spreading out across the lot with bid sheets in hand, they opened hoods and listened for bad valves or looked for oil leaks beneath tired engines.
Much of the equipment was either obsolete or on the verge of being junk. Mostly, the county offered high mileage vehicles, or tired school and office fixtures. Amidst the junk there were some gems.
Canaan was a poor county, with many poor people. If you were hard pressed for cash or credit, a tired truck, worn desk, or well-used tool was better than none at all.
An hour later men arrived who were accustomed to starting their workdays long after dawn. They were businessmen and small shop owners who surveyed the supply of desks, chairs, and other office equipment.
By ten o’clock the early viewing was over. The auction was ready to start. The crowd was a mass of testosterone, rubbing elbows, each wondering whose bid they would have to beat or calculating how much they could afford to buy what they wanted.
Above the crowd a girl, who turned six on her last birthday, bounced on her father’s shoulders. Her cherubic face and happy grin proved infectious to those she passed. Hardscrabble farmers would turn their heads to glance back and smile. She waved like a homecoming princess to all she passed. Her blond hair and blue eyes belonged to her mother, but her heart belonged to daddy. Without him, even a dreamed of trip to Disneyland would not be as much fun as this morning’s adventure.
*
It was first light when Jason woke her. She slid out of bed while the others slept. Before the furnace came on to drive out the night’s chill. Her father gestured, “quiet”, one fingertip pressed to his lips. She nodded. Stealthy as a ninja, she pulled on her clothes.
Outside she eased the screen door shut so it wouldn’t bang. Puffy clouds rose from her breath, feeling moist, as it passed her cheeks. The tow bike was already attached to her father’s bicycle. He wheeled it out of the garage and mounted the ten-speed mountain bike. She was about to climb on the half-bike when she stopped to give his leg a hug.
“I love you,” she whispered.
He bent down and tussled her hair. “I love you too.”
Ruthie smelled the scent of his shaving cream. In her mind it was inexorably mixed with daddy.
Jason suffered a visceral pain at her touch. Her love brought him such joy that for a brief moment he feared the possibility that it could be lost. Children became sick, they got hurt, some died. He pushed the worry aside. It left, like the fleeting shadow of an ominous cloud. He returned to the happiness of being with his daughter.
They glided away from their house to begin the fifteen-mile ride to Red Lake. At the end of the street Jason turned in the opposite direction.
“Where are we going?” Ruthie called.
“You’ll see!” he replied.
A block later they stopped at Abby’s coffee shop. The door opened to a burst of warm air and the aroma of fresh baked bread. In the red vinyl booths, early risers and a couple logging truck drivers sipped coffee between bites of short stacks or bacon, hash browns and eggs.
“Morning Ruthie. I see you brought your dad with you today,” Abby said from behind the counter. This reduced Ruthie to wiggling bundle of giggles.
“I always bring him, Miss Abby.” The word Miss came out sounding like “Mith.”
“Did you lose a tooth?”
“Yep my first one!” she said proudly. “The tooth fairy gave me a dollar! Of course I know that the fairy is really my daddy,” she said scrunching up her nose.
Abbey laughed. “What can I get for you Jason?”
Jason was thirty-eight, angular in build, and very nearsighted without his thick glasses, which he was busy wiping the fog from. Laughter rolled out of him readily, an easy disposition that made him welcomed wherever he went.
“Give us a hot chocolate and a coffee. Also a big stack of strawberry pancakes.”
Two hours later they pulled up to the public works yard in Red Lake. Jason parked the bike and swung his daughter up on his shoulders. He knew what he wanted and ambled along slowly, stopping to chat with friends or people he knew.
Jason and Ruthie came to an old bus parked in the rear of the yard. The paint was faded, both from sun and the steady eroding action of rain over the years. The safety yellow color had given way to rust streaks on the sides. Holes penetrated the rocker panels. The windshield and several side windows were cracked. The others were opaque, covered by grime.
“I love it!” Ruthie clapped her hands excitedly as she jumped up and down. “Are we going to buy it?”
“We’ll have to wait and see.”
Jason strolled around the bus. The county school district put it up for auction, hoping to be rid of it without having to pay dump fees. The buss had seen two generations of hard use on the back roads outside Red Lake. For years, it clattered over gravel roads and ground its way up mountains, the transmission suffering abuse from drivers whose skills varied. In winter it ran through snow, ice and slush. In spring and fall the motor was either choked by clouds of dust or drowned by muddy water that sprayed up from the road. The odometer had gone around and around, and finally stopped working altogether.
“Can I get in?” asked Ruthie, eager to be like her sister, Sarah, who boarded a bus in Mason Forks every school day.
Jason nodded. She scrambled up the steep steps. To her it was a magical palace. To Jason it had possibilities. Both were blind to the scars it bore from hard use. The vinyl upholstery was burnished smooth, the grain buffed away by countless squirming bottoms. Springs poked through holes in the seats. The rubber mat running up the aisle was shredded to ribbons. A layer of accumulated mud and grit covered the floorboards. Names were scratched into seat backs. Initials were etched inside crudely shaped hearts, tributes to long forgotten or now consummated infatuations. Some of the names were dead, some married, others had moved away, their childhoods now ghosts in time.
At ten o’clock Jason and
Ruthie waited in the auction area. The first call went out and the action began. Items moved quickly. Most were a bargain. A few sold for too much, their buyers having been carried away by the heat of battle. Father and daughter watched as a steady parade of office furniture, trucks, and odd bits of equipment moved across the stage.
The auctioneer kept up a steady stream of cajoling banter, while acknowledging and calling out the high bid. As item forty-two, a complete office suite, was wheeled out, the auctioneer stepped aside and spoke to his assistant.
“Ray, go try to start that bus. If you could drive it over here, we might get a better price.”
Content for a chance to smoke, Ray strolled toward the bus without much hope of success. He raised the hood, propping it open with the broom handle left on the radiator for that purpose. After connecting a portable power pack to the battery terminals, he climbed into the drivers seat, turned the key and pushed the starter. The starting motor whined, the engine choked out a rumbled of cancerous coughs, spat a wad of black smoke from the tail pipe, and died. Ray tried several more times. The diesel was reluctant. Wearily it chugged to life. The morning breeze carried a cloud of black smoke and the acrid smell of exhaust through the open door. He stepped on the clutch, which too readily, slumped to the floor. He wrestled the gearshift forward and amidst a gnashing of gears, the bus jerked forward. It rolled across the lazily. He pulled the wheel over, turning the bus in a wide circle so the exhaust would be carried away from him and the crowd.
On the podium the auctioneer, seeing the bus moving and wasting no opportunity, waved Ray over while announcing it as the next item. The idling engine gasped and wheezed like a man on life support. Ray let it run, fearful it might not start again.
“Who’ll give me five thousand? Do I hear five?”
Heads wagged. Buyers who knew better chuckled. From the crowd a man in his late fifties called, “Hell I rode that bus in high school.”
The auctioneer continued. “Do I hear four? Four thousand? Three? Will anyone give me three grand? A little work and this could be a homey camper, or a guest room on your ranch.”
The crowd was disinclined to share the auctioneer’s vision. The bus was tired. No one wanted it. The auctioneer knew disinterest could be contagious. Rather than slow the lively pace of the auction over a losing item, he said, “How about one thousand? Just ten c-notes and she could be yours?” His voice acquired a plaintive quality.
From the back, Jason Haskell, raised his bidding paddle. “I’ll give you one!”
“I have one thousand dollars!” called the auctioneer with relief. “Do I hear more? Are you going to let him motor away with this gem for only one thousand dollars?”
As the auctioneer scanned the crowd, Jason waved his arms, “Not one thousand he yelled, I bid one c-note! I’m bidding a hundred dollars!”
The auctioneer eyed the crowd. Silence lay upon them. He shrugged; consoled that at least the bus would be off the lot. “Going once, going twice, sold to bidder number 35 for one hundred dollars!”
Jason walked to the resolution desk, an ever-present smile on his face. He paid with a single hundred-dollar bill. In exchange he received the title and registration.
“What do you plan to do with the bus?” the cashier asked making small talk.
“Fix her and use her to bring people to the New Life Redemption Church!”
The man shook his head, slowly. “People riding in that bus are gonna need Jesus, brother!”
Jason rolled his bicycle over to the bus. He detached Ruthie’s bike and lifted both inside. She cavorted up and down the aisle until he told her to pick a seat. She chose the very back not knowing that when the bus was new black people would have been forced to sit there. She waved to father up front.
Jason took the driver’s seat. Pressed the starter, the engine surprisingly caught. The clutch felt loose as he eased the bus into gear. He pulled out of the auction yard leaving the remaining bidders to choke on a black cloud of diesel exhaust.
He drove straight to the Department of Motor Vehicles, where he filed the necessary paperwork for a change in title. After paying the fees, he was directed out back for the vehicle inspection. Jason worried that the church would be stuck with a useless bus if it failed.
The bus coasted to a mushy stop as the inspector walked over.
“Walt!” Jason called out with typical enthusiasm, “Look what I got for the church!”
Walter Johnson looked at the vehicle doubtfully. He lifted the engine cover and grimaced. He ran his hand behind the front wheel and over the brake drum. When he pulled his fingers out they were dark with an oily residue.
“Geeze Jason. This thing is almost dead.”
“Hey, it’s all we can afford. I’ll put some work into it, after I get back to Mason Forks.”
Walter stopped looking at the bus. He didn’t want to see any more problems. Instead he picked up the registration ticket and stamped it “PASSED.”
“Just get her fixed, Jason. I hope you make it home.”
Jason fired the engine up. The bus rolled out of the lot and onto the highway, leaving behind its ubiquitous cloud of fumes.
Chapter Two
The Lazarus Range runs north from Red Lake. The mountains acquired the name, when the lone survivor of a lost scouting party returned, four months after having been given up for dead.
Route 12 follows the range. A one time wagon road, it became a two-lane ribbon of asphalt during the great depression. A WPA works project that was a temporary salvation for many unemployed workers. The road was created by cut and fill along the edge of cascading mountain streams. Occasionally the highway runs under hills, by way of short tunnels, as it works its way north along the base of tall foreboding peaks.
People of a puritanical nature settled the area. The ghosts of their religion live on in the land. They left behind mountains with names like the Four Apostles and small settlements called New Jerusalem or Hebron. When they departed from biblical names, they chose ones that reflected their acute sense of morality like, Mount Justice, or the canyon called, “God’s Wrath. The landscape reflected their vision of a god who was to be feared.
Desolation Peak looms over Mason Forks, a small community that began as a trading post, founded by a trader of the same name. Russell Mason prospered selling mercantile goods to the early settlers. They bought his goods; he failed to buy their religious beliefs, thus the settlement kept its secular name.
In time, trade gave way to logging and the town grew. Prosperity made a foothold in the early twentieth century. Then in 1929, on “Black Friday,” the stock market crashed. The town never fully recovered from the ensuing depression. When logging resumed, many previous jobs had slipped away. Mills and logging camps required fewer strong bodies as machines replaced horse teams, wagons, and men.
One day the people of Mason Forks realized prosperity had passed them by.
Unlike Red Lake, to the south, which is a bustling resort town owing to its deep water lake, Mason Forks offers little that might attract visitors. It is merely another community, neglected by the state, and indistinguishable from many other hamlets that nestle throughout the Lazarus Range. People eke out a living cutting timber in the summer and taking unemployment in the winter. The locals decry welfare queens in the cities while considering their own food stamps as a seasonal necessity. Going, “on the stamps” was much like putting on snow tires. It was simply what one did at a certain time of year.
Situated on the north side of Desolation Peak, the mountain’s shadow lingers over the town, like the umbra cast by the cloud God gave the Israelites wandering in the desert. Sunlight does find the community, but not before mid-morning and it is gone early in the afternoon.
Locals often refer to the area as “the Forks.” The county road is the main street. It descends in a long easy slope toward the old mill house. The town offers a row of shops; more are boarded shut than are open, although the apartments above the shops remain occupied. The brick fronts ar
e dark and tired, although the trim has been redone on several. Like the heavy make-up of an aging harlot, the mountain’s shadow hides their failings, until they are revealed to be worn-out and coarse by the midday sun.
Hiram’s Hardware Store hangs on. Hiram’s family has lived in the area for five generations. He is the fourth generation to own the store. By nature he is amiable, but he is not to be hurried. A plaque by the register reads: “A crises on your part does not necessarily constitute a crises on our part.”
More than once a passing customer was told, “If you’re in such a dreadful hurry, why don’t you go to town.” This attitude was passable because the closest Wal-Mart was fifty miles away.
Next door to Hiram’s is Abby’s Coffee Shop. It’s doubtful it will survive when Abby, the long time owner, quits or dies. Few people would care to toil the long hours for the amount she gains. Abby likes people and sharing gossip is part of her pay. She is a large woman with a jovial laugh. Without her glasses, her blue eyes tend to squint above the apple curve of her cheeks. Her hair, which she wears pulled tightly back into a bun, has faded into gray.
She has lived in the Forks for fifteen years. When she opened the restaurant the community was pleased. There hadn’t been a decent cup of coffee within ten miles since the roadhouse closed two years before her arrival. At the time she opened, she was young enough and thin enough to turn eyes in town, so she quickly had a steady clientele of males. Wisely, she never played favorites and never fooled around. The womenfolk eventually decided she wasn’t a threat and accepted her into the community.
A gas station still operates at the edge of town, though the service bays are rented out to a sheet metal shop. The owner lives in Red Lake. Road-traffic was lost to the interstate when it passed by to the east. The local mechanics could not afford the computers needed to work on newer models and so he took a job in Red Lake.