Perry, Thomas - Jane Whitefield 02 - Dance for the Dead

by Perry, Thomas

  The blast of the shotgun slapped his left arm against the fence and deadened it. He was falling. His back slammed the ground hard and made him gulp air to reinflate his lungs. He tried to push himself up, but his mangled left arm would not respond, and he could see his dark, warm blood soaking into the snow. As he struggled to rise, it occurred to him that he had already heard the snick-chuff of the shotgun slide. “Stop!” he screamed. The weak, pleading sound of his own voice sickened him. He bent his legs under him, bobbed up, and turned to see her standing in the snow ten feet from him. She was only a dark, shadowy shape against the luminous snow. He waited for the roar of the shotgun, the splash of bright sparks, but they didn’t come.

  He gripped his injured arm with his right hand and pulled it painfully toward the center of his body. “Listen to me!” If he could just hide the right hand behind the left to get a grip on the pistol in his belt, he had a chance. “You need a way out of this as much as I do. The minute you helped your first felon to evade prosecution, you were meat on the hoof. Somebody – local cops, F.B.I. it doesn’t matter who – was going to notice you and hunt you down.” His fingers closed numbly on the pistol.

  “Without a powerful friend, you’re going to be somebody’s dinner.” He swung the pistol upward.

  The shotgun blast blew through his chest. His body toppled backward to rattle the links of the fence, then lay still. “But not yours,” said Jane. She turned and walked back through the snow to her car, put the shotgun in the trunk, and drove along the side of the building toward the gap in the fence.

  31

  Judge Kramer awoke from his dream. The house was dark, but the moon shone through the big magnolia tree outside his window, so small patches of gray-blue light fell on the bedspread. Something was wrong.

  He heard the little voice and remembered that he had heard it in his dream and tried to ignore it. But it was all right. It was just the boy.

  He swung his feet to the floor and walked out of the bedroom and down the hall to the guest room. He reminded himself that this was perfectly normal. A child who had seen what this one had was going to have night terrors. Kramer rubbed his eyes and struggled to wake up. He was going to have to be wise and strong and reliable. That was what this child needed right now. Adults came when you cried out in the night, and they told you everything was all right. If it wasn’t all right, they damned well made it all right.

  He stepped into the boy’s room and said, “It’s all right. Here I am, Timmy.” He had barely uttered it when he realized he was wrong. The bed was empty. He looked around him. The boy was gone.

  Kramer ran to the landing in time to see the triangular slice of moonlight appear on the floor of the foyer. The front door had opened. As he hurried down the first few stairs, he saw her step into the moonlight. “It’s just me, Judge,” said Jane Whitefield.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve come for Timmy.”

  “No,” he said. He was shaking his head, but he knew she could not see it. “There are procedures for this. The law provides for it. You can’t just…”

  He could feel, not see, Jane Whitefield’s eyes on him. “What does the law provide?” she asked.

  “When it’s safe, Children’s Services will find him a suitable foster home.”

  “It’s never going to be safe,” said Jane. “Even if all the money is gone, there will be people who think more might turn up or who know how to get more just by using his name. Barraclough had a lot of people working on these side cases for him. They’re still out there.” She took a step with Timmy.

  “You should know I have a gun.” The judge reached into the pocket of his robe.

  “So have I,” Jane said. “I didn’t bring mine either.” She turned, took Timmy’s hand, and then the slice of moonlight disappeared.

  It was after midnight when Carey McKinnon turned his car onto the long gravel drive that ran up behind his old stone house in Amherst and parked his car in the carriage house that had, at some point in his grandfather’s time, started being called “the garage.” He swung the two doors closed and put the padlock on the hasp, not because anyone had ever tried to steal anything here but because the wind was cold tonight and by morning it would be strong enough to blow the old doors off their hinges if he didn’t secure them. He had heard on the car radio that there was going to be another in the series of heavy snowstorms that had blown in, one after another, from the west, and he could already feel the cold front moving in.

  Carey walked up the drive toward his house, looking down at his feet and trying to step in the spots where the snow had not drifted. He reached his front steps and stood under the eaves, stamping the snow off his shoes as he stuck his key into the lock, when he heard a car door slam. He looked over his shoulder at the street.

  There was a person- – a woman – walking away from her car across his front yard: Jane.

  He stepped across the lawn to meet her. “Hey, I know you!” he said. “What happened – did your flight get grounded?”

  She smiled as they met, and he tried to get his arms around her, but the brown paper bag she was carrying was between them, so he snatched it away and put his arm around her waist. “No.” She stood on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. “I’m home.”

  They walked together to his front door and he opened it. “Why didn’t you call me? I’d have met you at the airport.”

  “Great idea, Carey,” Jane said. “Then tomorrow while you were at work I could walk back there in a blizzard and get my car.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, there must be some way that normal people do these things. I know some. I’ll ask.”

  He flicked on the light and they stepped into the little old-fashioned entry. He set the bag on the bench, hung his coat on a hook, slipped hers off her shoulders and hung it beside his, then took her into his arms. They kissed in a slow, gentle, leisurely way, and then Jane put her hands on the sides of his face, held him a few inches away, and looked into his eyes. “You waiting for the wind to close the door?”

  He shrugged, went to close the door, then came back and picked up the grocery bag. “Bring your laundry?”

  She took the bag and pulled out a bottle of champagne. “There was a power failure in the store, so I thought this was Tabasco sauce. I figured you might be able to use it.”

  “A common mistake, but I can’t launch the ship in this weather. Maybe we can drink it or something.”

  She reached into the bag again and pulled out a bouquet of white roses.

  He looked at her for a moment, puzzled. Finally he said, “Oh, you brought my roses back. Thanks. It was getting to be about time, but I didn’t want to say anything.” He took the roses and sniffed them. “Held up pretty well, didn’t they?”

  “Remarkably,” Jane said, but she barely got it out because he scooped her up and started to carry her toward the staircase.

  He took her up the stairs, set her gently on the big bed, and began by taking off her shoes. He proceeded to undress her slowly. When he had finished, he sank down on the bed with her. He said quietly, “I love you, Jane,” and before she could answer, his lips were on hers, and then by the time she could have spoken and remembered what she had wanted to say, words seemed unnecessary.

  Hours later, Carey McKinnon awoke in his dark bedroom and moved his arm to touch her. She was gone. He stood up and walked down the hall. He found her downstairs, sitting on the couch in his big, thick bathrobe, looking away from him to stare at the fireplace. She looked tiny, like a child. He could tell she had heard him. “Hi, Carey,” she said.

  “What are you doing, figuring out how you’re going to redecorate when your regime comes into power?”

  “No. Come sit with me.”

  He walked down the stairs and sat beside her. He saw that she was not smiling. “What’s wrong?”

  She leaned over and kissed him, then said, “I’ve been thinking about your offer.”

  “You look like you’ve made up your mind.”r />
  “I have,” she said. “One year from tonight, the tenth of January, you can set the date. If you’ll give me some notice, I’ll be there with something borrowed and something blue. If not, I’ll just be there.”

  He grinned, but then his eyes began to look troubled. “Why a year from now? I mean, I guess what I want to say is, ‘I’m happy. Ecstatic. I love you.’ But what is there about it that takes so long? It’s not as though we don’t know each other.”

  Jane turned to face him. “I’m going to tell you a story. At the end of it, you’ll say that you understand.”

  “I will?” he asked. “Then the year is to see if I really do understand. So it’s that kind of story.”

  “I’m going to tell you about my trip.”

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  EPILOGUE

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  In the spring of the year, as they had forever, Seneca women met at Tonawanda one evening at dusk to sing the Ohgiwe, the Dance for the Dead. Spring was the time when the dead came back. There were no drums, no rattles or flutes or bells, only the sad, beautiful voices of the women.

  In the center of the big longhouse-shaped room, there were six lead singers who knew the ancient songs of the Ohgiwe best and had melodious voices strong enough to last through the night. They would sing the burden, and the women who danced along the walls of the longhouse would answer in chorus. Tonight the lead group included two who were not among the usual singers. One was Jane Whitefield, who had not been to Ohgiwe in some years, and the other was Martha McCutcheon, senior mother of the Wolf Clan in Oklahoma. She had been the one to sponsor Sarah Cartman in open council – not the Sarah Cartman everyone had known since birth, but the new Sarah, the one who had been adopted with her son, Timmy, in accordance with ancient practice.

  The new Sarah Cartman danced along the wall in the circle with the other Nundawaono women. Six months ago she had been Mary Perkins. Six years ago she had called herself something else – maybe Stoddard or Stafford or Comstock – but she had done nothing under any of those names that she wanted to remember, so she did not think of them tonight. Instead, for a moment she anxiously wondered if she would be home in time to pack Timmy’s lunch box for school tomorrow, then remembered that tomorrow was Sunday. When she had been Mary Perkins, she had neglected to develop the habits of mind that she considered necessary to a good mother, so sometimes she overcompensated. Still, she was becoming more comfortable as Sarah Cartman, and after a time she had even begun to feel safe. By then she already had a name, a job, a household to run, and a son to raise. Doing had made her Sarah Cartman; being was an afterthought. Through the long night, as her feet became accustomed to the dance steps and she repeated the words in the unfamiliar language, she began to forget that she had not always known them.

  There were nearly a hundred other Nundawaono women, old grandmothers and young girls barely out of puberty, who danced for the dead on this night. Some wore modest spring dresses, as Sarah did. Others wore the traditional tunic, skirt, leggings, and moccasins, beaded and embroidered with all of the flowers that grew on the back of the great turtle that was the Seneca world. They wore them because women were the keepers and the source of life, the force that fought endlessly against the Being that is Faceless.

  There were guests among the dead tonight too, and there were those in the longhouse who could feel their presence. The women sang the Ohgiwe for all of them together and for each in his own right. Some sang for the first Sarah Cartman, who had died in an automobile accident this winter at a young age. There was one who sang for Timmy Cartman’s first parents, and for the couple who had taken him in and raised him. And she sang for Mona and Dennis, the lovers who had died in the fall.

  The women sang the Ohgiwe and danced together as the grandmothers had, for the brave and the unselfish, for the protectors. They sang until dawn, when the spirits of the dead were satisfied and returned to their rest, where they would not be tempted to disturb the dreams of the living.

  The End