Cold Quiet Country

by Clayton Lindemuth

  “I want to know why I’m here. Someone made a decision.”

  “The circumstances? Is that it? You want to know why?”

  “That’s right.”

  “If you would have made the same decision your mother made, would your life have more value?”

  I shook my head. “I want to know. That’s all.”

  “I’ve seen it go both ways,” Sharps said. “No matter what I tell you, you came from the same place, and you have the same bright future. Why does it matter? In my years here, many young men have asked for their stories. I’ve always believed in telling them, because a man’s history belongs to him. But if you can, I’d like for you to forget that you want to know. Does the bear cub care that his father wandered in from another county? These things are immaterial.”

  “Did you know your mother? Your father?” I said.

  “I did.”

  “Were they immaterial?”

  He looked out the window for a long time. I didn’t let up on gazing at him, knowing that if I turned away, he’d feel less pressure. But as long as I stared, he was on the spot. No matter how he wriggled, I wouldn’t let him off without confessing my past.

  He finally met my eye.

  “I will tell you what I know, Gale. But I fear you will take an incomplete story and fill in the blanks with your imagination, and you will invariably guess wrong. You will fill in the blanks with everything that could hurt you instead of everything that adds meaning and promise. We remember the bad, and if we don’t remember, we invent. So before I tell you, promise me you will always favor yourself with absolution for wrongs which were not yours and for which no one holds you accountable.”

  “I promise.”

  “You are bound to this promise. It is your word. Even if your spirits are down, even if you are tired, you are bound to your word.”

  “My origin must be a very bad story.”

  He waved his hand. Looked away. Paused.

  “An unsubstantiated story. Your mother was a good woman who didn’t cause the trouble she found herself in…and did her best to be responsible. She was a good woman.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ll tell you some.”

  “Tell me all.”

  “You tell me when to stop.”

  “Please…”

  “She came to me with a baby swaddled in her arms. She passed this child to me. I was surprised, thinking she only wanted to ask questions, and here a baby brayed in my arms. You were a noisy one. A hellion, Missus Sharps said. Blue-faced from yelling. Some children are quiet for years, and when they learn to talk, they are never again quiet. You were the opposite. Always irritated and ever willing to make sure we knew. But when you learned to talk, you ceased communicating. You were indrawn and—”

  “Who was she?”

  “I can’t tell you her name. I don’t recall.”

  “Gary,” I said. “You have to know her name. It has to be on a form or something.”

  He studied me. I’d never said his first name in nineteen years. No boy ever said his first name, even behind his back.

  “The laws are clear, Gale. I cannot tell you her name. And she doesn’t live around here anymore. She placed you in my arms and disappeared.”

  “Who was she?”

  “I don’t know anything but what she told me. She was poor, and alone, and from the East. She was passing through on her way to California, where she hoped family would help her get established in life.”

  “Passing through and decided to drop off her baby?”

  “Not exactly. She was passing through when she got pregnant and stayed in the area until she delivered you.”

  “And then she moved on.”

  “Right.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “She had no intention of getting pregnant, and the family that awaited her…they wouldn’t have understood.”

  “What family doesn’t understand being in a family way?”

  “I can’t describe them. I don’t know. I’m telling you what she told me. It wouldn’t have been fair to you as a baby for me to argue with your mother when she’d come to find a better future for you. Her actions…were an unselfish act of love.”

  I nodded. “Who was my father?”

  “Your mother didn’t tell me. She only said she was passing through a neighboring town and was hauled into jail for being a tramp. And it was there, she said, that a man…took advantage of her.”

  “Rape?”

  His eyes flashed to the wall, then the window.

  “I’m the son of a rapist?”

  “I don’t know that. She might have been trying to save face. The social pressures on an unwed mother—”

  “She said she was raped?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “She told you a name!”

  “I don’t know.”

  “WHO?”

  “Gale, dammit, I can’t tell you. Why? What will you do? Revenge? It doesn’t matter. You’re here. You’re talented and smart and will have whatever success in life you choose. You can start a business. Learn a trade. Be a teacher. You can do anything. The man who made you isn’t you.”

  “But I’m him!” I said, and stood. “I’m him. Who am I?”

  Sharps pushed back on his chair and leaned forward so that his elbows found support on his knees. Shaking his head, he said, “Who runs a jail, Gale?”

  “What town?”

  “Bittersmith.”

  * * *

  I waited in the woods where Burt had planned to brain me with a log. When dark came I had a little fire going under a rock overhang in a hollow. Pine trees muted the wind. The stone wall reflected the heat and by the time the smoke bent up around the four-foot-wide rock roof and drifted through the grove, it was so diffuse no one would ever suspect where it came from. Not that anyone would be out after dark on Christmas night into the woods, miles from any home but the Haudeserts and the Sundays. Everyone was with family, eating ham baked with nutmeg cloves, and mashed potatoes drowning in sweet ham gravy.

  It would be several hours before the Haudeserts bedded down, when it’d be safe to approach the house. I scavenged wood to keep the fire bright and hot and sat on a rock with my feet close to the coals, drying my boot leather. You can go a while with good leather before the ice and snow work through the polish, but once your feet are wet they’re cold.

  I’d hiked back and forth so many times in the past twenty-four hours, each time in the snow, that my boots were soaked. At one point I built the fire to a roar and removed my boots and set them close. I wrung my socks and the water fell like cow whiz on a flat rock. Then I suspended them on sprigs propped between rocks. The smell of baking wet leather and drying wool was potent, but every few minutes an easy breeze came through the hollow and replaced the stink with pine and snow.

  I watched the moon from when it first appeared between tree limbs, sometimes no more than a flash of silver behind drooping branches dressed in icing, until it rose high into the sky. Sometimes I nodded off, but the dying fire always brought me back because my bare feet got cold until I threw on more wood. Eventually I slipped on my dry socks and toasty, but damp boots, and stretched the aches from my back and behind.

  Somewhere nearby, I sensed eyes watching me. Had Burt stood on his porch and seen firelight through a dozen acres of trees? Couldn’t be.

  I shoveled snow onto the fire and stopped after a couple scoops, thinking it might be fortuitous to have cherry-red coals waiting for me if I met failure at the house. I put the remaining wood on the fire, trusting the three or four inches of snow covering the forest floor, and headed for the farm.

  A shadow flitted across the corner of my eye; I stopped. My hands were empty. I cast about the ground for a rock or limb, but all was covered in snow. Finally, a coyote darted from trunk to trunk. He slunk with his head deviously low, pacing me, offering friendship on a lonely night. If I fell
and broke my leg, he’d eat me.

  The terrain was up and down, slippery. I stumbled on an iced-over log and fell. Landed with my elbow jammed in my ribs. I was two-thirds to the field, and rested a moment before standing. My lonely friend sat concerned on his haunches thirty feet away, tongue lolling, watching.

  My pant legs rustled, ice crinkled underfoot, and my breath burst out in clouds of frost. The coyote pressed closer, as if unable to determine if I was old and infirm or young and stupid. The smell of my flesh in the dry frozen air must have been maddening. He grinned and revealed that of his twenty pounds, five were teeth.

  I was alone, but my companion reminded me I was never so alone that there weren’t others in the same plight, and though we were not cooperative, neither did we have to fear each other so long as we were strong. I talked to myself, entertaining him. He leaped along, content waiting for me to trip again and hoping when I did I would break something.

  The forest gave way to heaping mounds of snow-covered brush where Burt had cut trees and let them dry. Piles of dead limbs, where rabbits huddled in warmth and safety. I flopped over logs, skirted stumps. Tripped on an unseen hazard. Regaining my feet, I saw my comrade had stalked within spitting distance. His head drooped, but his agile front paws lifted out of the snow one at a time, and his shoulders swayed each time.

  I stepped into the field and he gave me a sorrowful glance, and bounded off.

  From the edge of the field I saw the house was dark. I linked up with the trail Burt had forged by dragging me, and found his boot prints on top of the path my body had made. A man like Burt Haudesert would have found joy in so simple an act as that. It would have reinforced his sense of dominion.

  I followed his footsteps, scrunching my toes every so often to confirm they were still dry.

  I stood on the outskirts of the house a minute, like the knight Gawain, looking on the Green Knight’s castle, knowing death waited within.

  Between the barn and house, there were so many footprints in the snow I didn’t worry about creating a new pair as they wouldn’t have given me away. I wondered, though, if Burt or Cal—Cal had always been the loonier one—might be waiting for me in the dark with a rifle. The hair on my neck rose. Cal could have been in the barn; each loft had a side that faced the house with plenty of knotholes larger than a rifle barrel.

  God gave me the imagination to gin up all kinds of abstract terrors, but he also provided the wits to hold them at bay. Realizing that I most feared Gwen would say, “Let’s run tonight,” I checked my other fears.

  What if she said, “I’m ready, let’s go.”

  What would I do but take her, and suffer a never-ending fear that she was hungry or cold and that I wasn’t doing my duty by her, that I wasn’t man enough to support her, that for all my hubris I was yet a mere orphan who’d read a lot of books and worked a lot of farms, but had yet to prove himself a worthwhile man?

  At the same time I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her to suffer. This is what the mythologies called the Scylla and Charybdis.

  I crept to her window. Stood to the side and listened. Sure she was alone, I tapped the glass with gloved fingers, issuing a tiny drumbeat until her bedsprings creaked. In a moment the curtain moved and her ghostlike face appeared in the dark. She wore no expression and the thought flashed through me that I shouldn’t have come. That she had chosen her plight and would choose to remain in it.

  While I dithered she opened the window and leaned from it into the cold and pulled me to her and swept her skinny bare arms around me. She shivered and squeezed, and I said, “I’m here.”

  “He said you’d never be back.”

  “Shhhh…”

  “He made it sound as if he’d left you for dead.”

  “I got away. Everything I own is waiting in the woods. I’ll take you away tonight, if you want.”

  She clung to me. “Tonight?”

  “It has to be you that decides. If I steal you away, it’s a tough life you’re stealing to.”

  She put her fingers to my lips and kissed my cheek and said, “Give me a couple minutes to get some clothes.”

  Gwen disappeared into the room and I realized nothing could be more obvious than my footprints to anyone who came around the side of the house. I’d been in such a morass of worry the night before when I gave her the ring that I hadn’t even considered the liability. Now I was doing it again.

  The next time Burt came after me it could very well be with a rifle and a deer-hunter’s aim. From the look in his eye that morning, he wouldn’t know how to prevent himself from murdering me. I taunted him pretty good about Cal nailing his missus.

  Gwen was at the window in a coat and I helped her outside. She pulled the window most of the way closed and said, “Let’s go to the barn and talk.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Gwen Haudesert is dead, murdered by Gale G’Wain. And I’m going to kill the son of a bitch.

  Looking at Gwen, I see her grandmother’s face. The faintest blush in the cheeks, the way her closed eyes sit under arched brows—as if in her final moment she was happy. Red hair so rich you can almost taste it. Skin so smooth you’d like to touch it.

  There’s blood on her belly and breast. Her blouse is open at the middle buttons, enough to expose a stab wound. Cooper must have checked, looking for a way to save her. But he had to have known he was too late.

  Where I expected to find a bare-stockinged foot, I find she—or Gale—fashioned a moccasin from corduroy cloth. Not enough to protect a foot from the elements. I squat, and though Cooper has made tracks around her and has already done all of this, I check for a pulse at her neck. Her skin is hard, like a peach too close to the refrigerator cold air vent. She’s been like this for hours. She’s been like this since before I set out after her. Probably from before the time I got the call.

  Who else is already dead?

  I lay over her the coat and the sweater I carried and spend a moment staring into the trees.

  Cooper stands a few feet away. Middle-aged dog breeder. Owns a five-and-dime in town.

  “You find her like this, Coop?”

  “I checked the wound.”

  “Was there a knife in her?”

  “No. I undid two buttons and that was it.”

  I dig the photo Fay Haudesert gave me from my pocket and hand it to Coop. Watch his face.

  “You ever hear of a boy named Gale G’Wain?”

  “Gale?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Accourse. He works at Haynes’s.” He looks at the photo, passes it back. “That’s him.”

  “What can you tell me?” I say.

  “Did he do this?”

  “Gwen’s mother thinks he did.”

  “Nah. Boy don’t have the gumption to slaughter a cow, let alone a girl as pretty as her.”

  “He’s the one we’re after. Did you stop by the barn or come right out?”

  “I looked for you at the barn. Coroner and Deputy Sager was there.”

  “Any women?”

  “Margot was visiting with Missus Haudesert, but I didn’t talk with her. I was looking for you, and when Sager said you was out in this, I figured I’d best get a start.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “So you saw Burt?”

  Coop nods.

  I look at the sky. Above the boulder the trees are hardwoods and look like skeletons. The clouds are mostly purple, what I can see of them. We stand in the lee of a giant rock that angles out like the prow of a ship. Where the rock meets ground, brown leaves poke up. A few feet away is a fire circle. I touch the cold ashes. Smells fresh. I check Gwen’s foot, undo the knot at her toes. The snow and ice are worked all through the cloth. She didn’t have the chance to warm her feet at the fire—so the fire was maybe from the night before.

  This was all the lodge Gale had for her.

  I swear I’m going to kill him.

  The snow is thin where Gwen lies. Blood shows pink, since a few flakes have blown in. To the side of her bo
dy, ten feet away, is a mess of footprints and pink spatter. A circle is trampled, and the path that leads to Gwen’s body is like you’d see if a log was dragged.

  A single pair of wide-spaced footprints leads from the fire.

  Gale ran.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Coop says, “and you’re stark raving mad if you try.”

  “He’s out there.”

  Coop is quiet. I tamp tobacco into my pipe.

  “I saw you lying in the field,” Coop says. “I thought you was dead and started toward you, but when you got up, I got back on the girl’s trail. What was you doing in the snow, Sheriff?”

  “He’s out there ready to cut someone else up. There’s caves in these woods. Rock overhangs. He could have a shelter made already. He could be sitting next to a fire right now, snappin’ off while he thinks about this poor girl. I’ll be goddamned if I let him.”

  “Maybe. But this storm? We ain’t seen the start of it. There’s a front coming through from Canada liable to bury us in ten feet, for chrissakes. If it does like back’n fifty-eight you can kiss your senile ass goodbye. We won’t find you ’til March or April, and only what the wolves leave.”

  “Look at her!”

  A black squirrel chatters at my outburst. Coop’s eyes lock on mine.

  “Look at her! You see what that snake did?”

  Coop points beyond a lightning-scarred beech at the sky. “You see clouds that look like midnight, dumping snow by the truckload? You don’t got to worry about Gale G’Wain. If he’s got shelter out here, he’s smarter than us. If he don’t, we’ll find him after the thaw. The girl’s gone, Sheriff.”

  I step a few yards. Kick snow. Coop’s bluetick stands a dozen feet away, tied to an oak sapling. He’s dug a nest down to the leaves, but stands on it, maybe too cold to curl up.

  “I’m sure Burt has a tractor that can get across the field,” I say.

  “Use one of his snowmobiles. We lash her to a toboggan and drag her out. We just got to get her to the field.”

  “Let’s go,” I say, and stoop to her feet.

  Coop unties his dog from the tree, unclips the leash and stuffs it into his pocket. The dog watches with mournful eyes. Coop stands beside me.