“Let’s put her on top of the coat,” he says.
In the distance, the sound of a half-dozen snowmobiles rises to a bare whisper and with a quick turn of the breeze vanishes.
* * *
After Mister Sharps told me about the circumstances surrounding my birth, and before I departed the Youth Home to fend for myself, I visited the Monroe County courthouse. Mister Sharps had named me Gale G’Wain after a medieval story about a particularly honorable knight—and had always claimed he didn’t know the name my mother had given me. I would not find my birth record at the courthouse.
I climbed the courthouse steps and found a solid block wall at the top. I thought the doors might have been recessed between mighty columns. I had seen the courthouse a dozen times, always from the same angle, but never had occasion to enter the sacred building. It stood taller than four flagpoles and wide as thirty of the businesses located on the opposite side of the street. Each of its four sides was a faćade. Up close, the pale weathered walls resembled an old textbook illustration of the House of Usher: rust-colored stains near the roof and black decay between the giant blocks.
But the courthouse only appeared macabre up close. I wondered why those steps led to a wall with no entry, almost as if a hubristic architect had invited me to judge the fitness of the structure, and the institution it housed, and at the exact moment I accepted his invitation he proved a trickster.
I climbed down the steps and with appropriate distance, the temple appeared ghostly and spiritual, a truly hallowed house of justice.
If Bittersmith had arrested my mother, the record ought to have been archived there. Not that an arrest for being a drifter legitimized rape. At that time I wasn’t looking for a confrontation with Bittersmith. I was investigating facts. The historical record was a starting place.
I entered from the north side, through giant doors constructed to make men feel insignificant. Lawyers with briefcases and chiseled frowns hurried here and there. I looked up the stairway, which started out at least twelve feet wide, and I got a foggy notion that the people who worship the law will use any available edifice, or snag any circumstance, to make their god appear competent. The granite architecture, the big square looming shape, signified the court’s conclusions were permanent and the institution was impregnable. I was happy to accept that. Should I uncover misdeeds as foul as Mister Sharps related had occurred to my mother, this courthouse would sustain justice.
I climbed the echoing stairwell to the third floor. Each step led to warmer and warmer air until I was sweating and nervous entering the records keeper’s office. The woman behind the high counter remained seated. She looked like a barrel of mud wearing reading glasses.
“Good morning, ma’am. You look sunshiny today. I need to investigate arrests in Bittersmith. This courthouse has the records?”
“Who are you?”
“Gale.”
She frowned. “Who you with?”
I turned partly to the side. “I’m alone.”
“I guess I confused you. Who do you represent? Awful young for a lawyer. You with a newspaper?”
I felt my face flush because she was a poor communicator and I wasn’t easily confused. A wooden item on her desk said Henrietta Gibbons. I said, “I represent myself, Miss Gibbons. Or if that isn’t good enough, my mother.”
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t know.”
Henrietta inhaled and slumped at the same time. “I’m busy now. Sit over there.”
“I’m not busy now, and if you’ll just show me where to look, I apologize for the interruption.”
“Sit over there and I’ll be with you when I can.”
I sat on a stiff wooden bench with no back, but situated close to the wall. I fought to remain square-shouldered and stiff-backed in case she chanced a look over the counter, but as the wall clock’s minute hand passed the quarter-hour mark, and then the half-hour mark, I leaned. After an hour, I slouched like a no-good lazy dullard.
She sat been behind her counter, invisible, the whole time. I imagined her filing her nails.
I approached again and saw her reading what appeared to be the same paperwork as an hour before.
“Please, ma’am. It’s very important. I apologize for my rudeness. Is there no way you could spare a minute to point me in the right direction?”
“What are you looking for?”
“My mother’s arrest record.”
“Why?”
“I don’t believe she was arrested.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“The sheriff in 1951 was Bittersmith, right?”
Her eyes began to widen.
I continued, “You heard any rumors about Bittersmith?”
Her eyebrows knotted and her cheeks flushed rosy and she pushed back her chair. The wood legs squawked until she lifted her girth on thighs hidden by a brownish floral pattern.
“What’s your mother’s name?”
“I don’t know. She gave me up. But she’ll have been arrested in Bittersmith in June, 1951.”
Henrietta Gibbons led me to an ominous room with DOCUMENTS AND RECORDS stenciled on the tilted glass above the door. The closer we got the stuffier my nose became, and I thought I was near a sneeze fit.
“There couldn’t have been that many arrests in Bittersmith,” I said.
She looked at me curiously, then turned sideways and sidestepped through the narrow doorway. She hit a switch and the room illuminated. It was full of file cabinets and dust. Each drawer had a year or two on the tab marker. I followed her. Going back in history, each file drawer contained more years, as if people in the past were less liable to run afoul the law.
She stopped, and I bumped against her. I’d thought she was a granite mountain, but she was soft like a cut of rare meat. She smelled sharp like crystalline sweat.
“Here you are. Nineteen fifty-one. What month you say?”
“June.”
“Look from May to July. Every baby don’t go nine months.”
She unlocked the drawer, slid it open until the metal rails clicked. All of the records for Monroe County in 1951 took the width of a tackle box. Fifty-three, however, was a particularly pestilential year and was half-again as thick. I wondered how Sheriff Bittersmith fared.
I thumbed through each arrest card, reading the typed and often smeared name in the top left corner. Most arrestees were men, and I made rapid progress. Between May and July, only three women in all of Monroe County had been arrested. One was for drunk and disorderly conduct, another was accused of robbery, and the last arrest was for prostitution. This sparked my curiosity. I could imagine a corrupt sheriff maneuvering an itinerant woman into his jail cell by claiming she was a prostitute. But she was arrested in Monroe.
I carried the card to Henrietta. “Is it possible that a woman would be arrested in Bittersmith but the card would say Monroe?”
She shook her head, and I returned to the files.
Sheriff Bittersmith didn’t arrest anyone during those three months. I went through all of the cards again. I checked 1950 and 1952 as well. Bittersmith never arrested anyone.
I thanked Henrietta Gibbons and shook my head when she inquired to the result of my search. Morose, I trudged down the steps. I stopped at the second floor. The courtroom doors were open. A dozen suit-clad men sat inside. A uniformed man stared out of the witness box, robust as an oak stump. He wore a silver mustache and hair that was neat and oiled, combed from a perfectly straight part.
“Now, Sheriff Bittersmith, is it your recollection that the defendant was at all nervous in his disposition, or in any way not forthcoming with relevant facts?”
My heart stopped beating and my blood halted in my veins.
Bittersmith grunted an answer I didn’t even hear. I sat in a pew in the back and watched, fearing he would recognize me and know my purpose. Bittersmith’s eyes remained fixed on the wall, and his voice carried a whisper of contempt, a man of action forced to suffer men of thought.
/>
“No further questions, Your Honor.”
Ramrod straight, Bittersmith stepped down from the box. He made a point of staring at the defendant as he walked by. I hadn’t even noticed the man, a short fellow with squirrelly hunched shoulders. Bittersmith walked past me.
I followed him into the hall, and down the stairs. At the bottom floor, Bittersmith whirled. I was higher by two steps, but our heights were equal.
I saw my face in his.
“You following me, boy?”
“I am.”
He glanced me up and down. “What the goddamn hell for?”
“Do you remember an arrest from the summer of nineteen fifty-one? A woman…a drifter on her way to California?”
He shook his head, turned, and walked away.
“Sheriff! You arrested her in fifty-one, and I can’t find a record upstairs.”
He stopped. “Then how do you know?” He waited. He spread his arms partway to the sides, a merry gesture as if to initiate a gentleman’s wager. But his face held no joviality, just the candor of his challenge. “How do you know, boy?”
My throat froze.
He walked away.
I stood looking at the polished floor, the granite walls, the fancy woodwork. I listened to the echo of his footsteps and registered the finality of the giant door swinging closed. They hadn’t built this place for my mother, or me.
* * *
It used to be that even women would stop and stare at Margot Swann Haudesert.
When you saw her naked, you would give your life to touch one breast. You’d barter your soul to bury your face at her thighs. She used to squeal and giggle, and you knew you’d be a beast if you didn’t give her more. She could call the goat out of any man. The first time I was with Margot, I spilled early. Anticipating her firmness, her sweetness…having tasted her. Smelled her. Breathed and consumed her. I kept going like a rock-ribbed son of a bitch and only lasted a few minutes before it happened again. I waited. Only on my third did she cry out.
Her husband was a salesman who took out-of-town trips. I’d made her acquaintance making a deposit at the bank while she was making a withdrawal.
Until you see beauty like hers, you can’t conceive it. When you finally taste it, you’re a slave.
I loved her many times, until one day she met me at her door with flushed cheeks and wet eyes, saying she was a terrible woman, a rapacious, irredeemable sinner, and that I’d taken advantage of her, and she’d rather be consumed by the flames of hell than ever feel my touch again.
Over the months that followed, on the rare occasions I saw her about town, she seemed to be gaining weight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Gwen was so close to being mine that I wanted to take her to the loft in spite of the hair standing stiff at the back of my neck and the nervous sweat on my brow.
“Is there anybody outside?” I said. “Is everyone in the house?”
“I don’t think anyone came outside,” she whispered.
“It’s nothing. Just a feeling,” I said.
She smiled, and I knew she figured I was afraid.
“Come on.” She took my hand and I pulled it back from her and took my glove off so I could weave her fingers in mine. She put her thumb on top of my thumb, until I put mine over hers and she let me.
We entered the barn from the door beside the main bay, tiptoeing as if our footfalls might be audible above the gusts and groaning boards. An arctic front had moved in.
“The loft?” she said.
“Uh—is that smart? I mean—”
She pulled me to the ladder.
I said, “Do you know what time it is?”
“After midnight. Maybe one.”
I didn’t think there was much chance Burt would be wandering around at that hour. Unless…
“Did Burt…did he visit you, tonight?”
She was partway up the ladder and I didn’t want to raise my voice. Her pant legs brushed as she climbed, her hands smacked the rungs—all amplified by my mind, and my nerves. When I reached the top and found her already supine on a hay mattress, I kept my mouth closed and snuggled beside her.
I pressed my cold nose to her cheek and she pressed her cold nose to mine and next thing, her mouth covered my mouth. She was hungry. She tossed me back to the night months before when I woke up with her hand in my pants. I answered her moans with grunts. She squeezed my shoulder and I pressed her coat and unbuttoned it, slipped my hand around her back and then back to her front and then over her breast, as if I’d planned on touching her neck and her breast happened to be in the way and I’d no choice but to grab a hold.
I fought two battles. Since the first time she’d visited me in the barn, neither of us had ventured this close to erotic behavior. When we’d snuggled, it was only compassion, because I’d grown up questioning not just my place in the world, but my right to have a place at all. She was on metaphysical eggshells too. The first battle I fought was against Gale G’Wain, and whether I ought to enjoy her the way she wanted me to.
The other battle was in the back of my mind, all the time wondering when staying in the barn became a mortal liability. I rolled in the hay with a girl whose three defenders were crack rifle shots, militia-minded, and ready to kill. Not one of them was more than fifty yards away. Part of me thought I can’t believe breasts are so soft, and the other part thought, how would it feel to have a bullet cut through me? Is this nipple worth it? The pair of them?
Before long she stripped off her coat and I did mine, and since hers was a full-body parka, we spread mine like a bottom blanket and pulled hers on top, and we just kissed and touched.
It oftentimes happens that you know what’s going to destroy you ahead of time, and you’re perfectly right.
* * *
The deputy’s car is a few hundred yards from the house, catty-corner through the woods. I don’t bother laying a set of circuitous tracks, or walking backwards like they do in the westerns. My leg hurts too much from the knife wound and the Lysol. Besides, the deputy found me at Coates’s house, and probably made a radio call, and if not, whatever logic brought him will bring someone else.
Maybe Sheriff Bittersmith.
Part of the reason I wanted to work at Haynes’s was to see how an artisan butchered. Another part of me wanted to make money to take Gwen away from her troubles. I denied the last reason. After being around Gwen and seeing the product of her father’s abuse, and thinking of my mother in that context, I wanted to be closer to Bittersmith.
I wanted to know my enemy.
One morning, Haynes turned off a band saw and called, “I need salt. Twenty pounds.”
“I think you have plenty of salt. I’ll go look.” I thought he meant the pound-and-a-half Morton canisters out front, for sale to his customers. He didn’t sell much and didn’t stock much, but he was far from out.
“No, for the hides. We slaughter tomorrow morning—you salt the hides. I didn’t make it to the depot. I’ll explain when I don’t have a saw full of meat. Go buy twenty pounds.” He retrieved his wallet and handed me a ten-dollar bill with a red thumbprint. “You can carry twenty pounds, right?”
I walked to the grocery. The morning sun hadn’t warmed the air and my lungs ached. Two blocks away I saw a brown Bronco parked on the sidewalk out front.
I stopped outside the door. Many times I’d relived my feeble courthouse confrontation with Bittersmith, how he said I couldn’t prove anything about him arresting my mother. In my visions I had a stronger riposte, that God could prove it, and if Bittersmith was lucky, it would be God and not me that addressed his sins, because my wrath was bigger, and I was not constrained by forgiveness.
But knowing the perfect rejoinder didn’t give me the courage to utter it, and I felt guilty for blasphemy.
Bittersmith sat on the counter and leaned partly across so that he was above the woman ringing up his purchases.
I opened the door. Bittersmith twisted at the chime, sized me up, and spoke to the
woman. His unintelligible words sounded like Burt Haudesert seducing a hog he was about to scramble with a .22. The woman flashed a look at me. She was younger than I thought at first, and pretty as a three-eyed potato. I walked past them both. Her pupils were big and her mouth was narrow. I walked down an empty aisle, past the sugar and salt and flour and yeast, and loitered at the end cap. My fingers felt swollen and my legs itched from the exercise in the cold air. My face burned and my heart raced. I knew what Bittersmith was doing. The girl was prey.
I affected interest in the many varieties of kidney beans. Bittersmith didn’t move, and for a long time I watched his back. Finally I spotted his eyes in a mirror on the wall, set up high. Fear shot through me like I’d been caught wrong, like I’d lost an advantage and was suddenly tossed headlong into a battle I’d been observing a moment before. He’d been watching me watch him. He had the eyes of a hunter. Did he remember me from the courthouse? I wanted to bolt without trying out my pert response, but the only thing between that girl and her fate was me.
Damned if I was going to turn my back on her.
Bittersmith rested his hand on the girl’s shoulder and spoke to her. She nodded slowly, like the motion drove a nail into her skin. I held a can of beans. He turned and approached. I glanced at him. He grew taller and taller. I wondered how he was my father.
I wondered if I could brain him with beans.
“You passing through?”
“I work at Haynes’s.”
“That so?”
“Yes.”
“You here for beans?”
“A couple items.”
“I don’t like you.”
I squeezed the can. Held my tongue.
“I don’t like the way you’ve been watching me, like you’re set to rob the place.”
“I’m no thief.”
“You ought to move along, ’fore I decide you and me need to have a more thorough conversation.”
“I’m here to buy a couple of things.” I placed the beans back on the shelf.
The door chime sounded.
An elderly man and woman entered the store and took a pushcart. They walked slowly. Bittersmith scowled. “I see you again, it’s royal goddamn trouble.”
Cold Quiet Country Page 16