by Jeffrey Lent
FIVE DAYS LATER ninety-two-year-old Emmett Kirby was found dead. It was George Contrell found him, going in to talk about the scant second cutting of hay the drought was sending up. But it was Rob Dutton who stopped by Hewitt’s to break the news—Hewitt already alerted by the racing ambulance and then the county sheriff and state trooper cruisers running hard past his place, sirens off but lights flashing. But Emmett’s place was far enough up the road so Hewitt had no idea what the tragedy was, the road going all the way to Bethel and then Randolph and on from there. It could’ve been anyone. Some kid on an ATV with a broken leg for Christ sake.
He was up out of the forge late morning when he heard the truck turn in and seeing it was Robbie knew right away it was much closer to home.
Rob Dutton was a cool man, sharp-eyed with a slow temper far back beneath his assessment of the range of catastrophe that came his way. He was fire chief and town constable both. He stepped from his truck red-faced with anger, wearing his shoulder pistol outside his shirt and Hewitt knew without looking there were at least two more in the cab of the truck, one under the seat and another in the glovebox and all loaded. Along with a deer rifle in the window rack.
Jessica had been puttering in the flowerbeds growing alongside the barn since the first ambulance siren blast alerted them, as if she did not want to get far from Hewitt. But when Robbie got out of his truck he looked at her once and said, “I need to talk to Hewitt, here. Could you go on to the house or something.”
She frowned at Rob and Hewitt simply said her name. She looked at him and turned and walked up into the high flower gardens where she could see them but not possibly hear.
Robbie was direct. “It was the worst thing I ever saw, Hewitt. Whoever it was, tied him snug into that chair of his by his stove. There was cigarette burns on his arms and face and his hands were busted with a chunk of stovewood and we know it was stovewood because there was splinters stuck in the backs of his hands. Not to tell that we found the piece of wood on the floor dropped next to the chair. But not before that fucker battered his head in. His skull broke open two or three places. Shit.” Robbie paused and swallowed several times.
“I thought I was gonna puke again just telling you. Nothing touched except one kitchen cabinet left open and the top shelf empty. I guess you know what was missing. Shit. It wasn’t a secret old Emmett had a stock of painkillers. Heavy-duty stuff, I don’t know what all. The state boys said they’d find out. There was a empty bottle dropped on the floor. They’ll get some prints from that. But the way it looks whoever it was, once they hurt him so bad he told em where to find it, they swallowed some down and then finished him off. Goddamn motherfucker. I mean, he was all fucked-up and most likely it was a gift when that asshole raised up that stovewood and busted his head open. Most likely Emmett was already gone. What was done to him would stop the heart of a man half his age. Fuck all. It’s outa my hands and I probably broke some kind of law coming here and telling you but you known him since you were a boy and, well, I thought you ought to know. The state boys’ll be by to talk to you, see if you heard or saw anything out of the usual. And everybody knows you got a houseguest who’s a stranger. Fuckin A, Hewitt.”
“Jesus Christ,” Hewitt breathed.
“Yeah, well. I guess He was otherwise occupied a couple mornings ago.”
Hewitt nodded. “You know anything else yet?”
“Nope. But the ambulance had to take him to Hitchcock for a autopsy and then I guess Chris Maxham’ll be taking care of things. Likely there’ll be something in tomorrow’s paper.”
“You hear, let me know.”
“I will. I will, Emmett. Holy shit I just called you Emmett, didn’t I? Idn’t that something.”
The two men were quiet a bit. The day seemed to be seeping the news into itself and holding it. After a bit Hewitt said, “Hey Robbie?”
“What?”
“You got any pull with those state boys?”
“Not much. Why?”
“I know they’ve got to come down and talk to me. And I know they’re going to want to talk to Jessica too. That’s the girl. But … well, she doesn’t work things through the same way you or I do. She’s not crazy, not dangerous crazy at least. And she never even met Emmett. Had no idea of what he might’ve had stashed away in his house. You hearing me?”
Rob Dutton looked at Hewitt and said, “I’m not protecting anybody, Hewitt.”
“Fuck you, Dutton. Those county and state boys have their ways and you know what I mean. It’s the kind of shit could let me come out one morning and find her sucking the exhaust pipe of her car. You understand that?”
Rob looked at Hewitt a long time. He said, “Tell the truth Hewitt. You have any reason to even suspect the tiddliest she might have been involved in this business?”
Hewitt thought slowly over the past few days. There were gaps certainly but not even the faintest of flags. He said, “Not a cunt hair of a possibility.”
Rob studied him and then said, “I’ll do what I can. But no promises.”
“Thanks, Robbie.”
Dutton got back up into his truck. He looked out the rolled-down window and said, “If you’re fucking with me I’ll come and put a hole in your foot, you hear me?”
Hewitt nodded and said, “You’re welcome to it, it comes to that. That’s how sure I am.”
HE WALKED UP in the garden and told Jessica as simply as he could what had happened and what they might expect. She sat through his telling but wrapped her arms around her ribs and rocked slightly back and forth. When he was done she kept rocking until he touched her shoulder and she stopped like a stone, looked at him and whispered, “Sonofabitch,” and stood and walked toward the house.
He spent a long afternoon waiting for the police, state or county, to arrive. But they never did. Hewitt reckoned the cops had something else to sniff out. Late in the day he went back to the smithy to clean up from his suddenly disturbed work. He came out into dusk and saw her, waiting for him by the barns. She had her old sleeping bag under one arm and a paper sack gripped in her other hand.
“Well, now,” he said. “Going camping?”
“I don’t want to be in the house just now. It’s too small. I’m going to walk up and sleep out in the woods.”
“Woods can be spooky at night.”
She pointed. “There’s a fair bit of moon. And it’s warm enough. If I find a cranny amongst those big trees I can sleep fine and be hidden and hear anything coming before it sees me.”
He wanted to touch her face. He felt she was sliding and didn’t even know it. He said, “I’d say you’re right, at least as far as people. But the creatures, they’ll smell you even if you lie still as the tree you’re sleeping under. It’s a nice night to sleep in the woods. You have some supper in that sack?”
“Extra clothes. I’m not hungry.”
“Sure. Neither am I.”
“I’m sorry about that old man.”
“Me too. I knew him all my life.”
“There isn’t any safe place, is there, Hewitt?”
“I guess not.”
She paused and then said, “Those police never did show up.”
He nodded. “I think we’re pretty much written off as suspects. You want me to grab my bag and come sleep in the woods with you?”
“No. You stay at the house. One of us has to not look crazy in case they come.”
“Jessica.”
Then a long pause. She hitched up her gear and turned to look up the hill toward the ridgetop and then back to Hewitt. She said, “There’s been twice I really thought I was going to die. The once I ended up with a black eye and being raped. The other time I got the shit beat out of me by one of those boys I was talking about, one of those nighttime big-ass boys. That was the worst. They’re real smart about beating a woman so she feels it all over except on her face. But I didn’t know that—I just thought he was going to kill me. It scared the crazy right out of me. I just rolled up in a ball, cut my cheek on a p
iece of broken glass on the pavement. He just kept working me over, kicking the backs of my legs and my butt and my back. I felt like my insides were breaking apart. When he finally quit it was all I could do to walk. And I peed blood for two weeks. Every part of my body was black and blue. It was a bad time and I was near broke but I inched my way out of that town. I couldn’t drive but a couple of hours before I was hurting too bad. I finally found a back road that ran along a river with a place to hole up for a few days. It was last summer so it was warm. I ate food out of cans so I didn’t need a fire. I swam in the river and that helped. Mostly I slept. Some old fellas come along fishing and surprised me but they was kind, gave me some food and left me be. Although as soon as they left I headed out. It was enough of a break so I’d quit blaming myself for what had happened. Quit believing I deserved it. Goddamn Hewitt, the world’s an ugly place.”
He studied her a long moment. Then he said, “There’s certainly enough ugly to go around. Go on up in those woods, see if they’ll help. But just one thing, okay?”
“What?”
“You get cold or spooked or whatever come right back down quick—don’t wait long enough to know if you’re imagining things or not.”
“You think whoever it was—”
“I don’t think anything. Except a couple days or nights ago somebody tortured and killed an old man right up the road and nobody knows yet who it was or where they are. That’s all I know.”
She stood a bit. Then she said, “Maybe I should stay here. I just want out of the house. Space around me. I want to look at the stars.”
Briefly, he was brilliant. “Sleep in the orchard. Go up above the barn and find a nice soft bed of clover and sleep amongst those old trees. That’s a fine place. Peaceful and lovely as can be.”
HEWITT WASN’T HUNGRY but he sat at the kitchen table and drank a beer. Here’s to you Emmett. Half a century ago Emmett had been spreading manure when the apron chain on the spreader jammed and he’d whoa’d up his team and climbed back in the body to try and work it free and somehow got his foot caught under a spacer, crying out as he slipped on the slick boards, inadvertently signaling the team which simply stepped up to the job and went on to the end of the field, made their turn on the headland and headed back down while Emmett was pulled through the whirling rows of teeth and beaters and dumped on the ground like an empty sack—cut and bruised, with a broken leg and arm as well as a punctured lung and damaged kidney and large intestine and three vertebrae crushed in his back. His wife had found him when she saw the team standing in the dooryard when she went looking for him for noon dinner. She’d died before him and Emmett survived—a crooked gentle old man.
Hewitt moved to the living room, thinking he might play some music as part of this private memorial. But in all the years all the times he’d been in that old farmhouse he’d never once heard a radio on, never so much as glimpsed even the oldest of gramophones. Perhaps Emmett was one of the last where music meant singing the old songs and hymns learned at home. So he instead sat silent in the dark. As the old man must’ve so many nights, the long winter nights especially. With one or more of the dozen house cats up in his lap. The cats had moved from the barn to the house after his wife died.
He wondered why Emmett had not recognized the maniac intent of his attacker and given up the goods more easily. To not put himself through what so clearly was going to be a long and agonizing death, undoubtedly aware from the beginning there was no way free of this particular mess. And then Hewitt knew. That toughness, that holding-out had nothing to do with the attack, the pain, the ever more certain death. And this translated into scorn for the punk, the shit, who was trying to inform an old man his body was capable of sustaining great pain. Hewitt knew Emmett would spit at the thought of anyone trying to use the obvious against him.
He could see in his mind’s eye the old man in his kitchen and his wormy hands gripping the frayed edges of his chair, and wondered what would become of the cats. And resolved to inquire and try to bring home at least one or maybe a pair. For Emmett. For himself. The barn cat was wobbling and ancient and there was a fair chance that a new cat on the place would be the end of him but perhaps not—cats were uncanny in determining territory. And Hewitt liked the idea of having a living extension of Emmett alongside him.
HE WENT TO bed a little after ten. He briefly stood at his window looking out over the farm in the pale moonlight. He could see the orchard, the faint illuminated lump of a girl in an old duck sleeping bag.
At two he woke and gazing out the window, was wondering what sort of night she might be having, how disturbed, how cold and wet with dew, how long she would lie awake studying the great dreaming limbs of the apples over her, her tent against the night sky.
At five o’clock he woke from a deep dreamless sleep to find her curled in her damp bag on the oval rug beside his bed. He lay studying her and then ever so quietly slipped out the other side of the bed and made his way downstairs.
THAT EVENING HE dressed and after a small argument she drove him into Bethel to Chris Maxham’s for the calling hours. He tried his best to convince her to come in with him, arguing it could dispel any lingering doubts about her.
“I’ll wait with the car,” she said. “I don’t know any of those people and I don’t want em peering at me while they should be attending to the business at hand. Which is gathering for your friend, right?”
In the end she showered and changed into her dress and boots although she made a stop in Lympus on the way and bought a pack of cigarettes. So she could have something to do while she was waiting for him.
The next morning he was getting dressed once again, this time planning to catch a ride with Walter to the service at the Lympus Congregational Church. His face was red from shaving twice in twelve hours. Jessica was not coming. The night before had been fine but she felt each and every person who went into or out of the funeral home cast long eyes toward where she leaned against her car, smoking. Which Hewitt, while assuring her it had been her imagination, was certain was true.
So she was staying at the house. Hewitt was back in his suit, his jaw raw and his throat constricted by his tie, waiting for Walter. When she came into the kitchen in his old sweatpants and a couple of layers of shirts although barefoot, waving her cheap revolver at him. It made him jump and a swift mirth passed over her face. Then she said, “All right, asshole. Where’s my goddamn shells?”
For a moment he didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Hello? The clip? Where’s the fucking clip goes in this gun?”
“What do you want that for?”
She looked at him and tilted her head and tapped the end of the pistol barrel against the side of her head as if to determine if her skull was hollow or held a brain. Then said, “Because I don’t want to be stuck here alone without it.”
Hewitt did his best to breathe deep without appearing to do so. He understood. A man-killer was still somewhere. On the other hand she knew, at best, maybe two dozen people she might recognize on sight. He didn’t want to come back from the funeral and find a clueless client belly-up in his front yard. After what seemed a very long time he walked to the shelf above the stove and handed her the clip. He wanted to give her advice but it was too complicated and he wasn’t sure where to begin. And then the Thunderbird rolled into the yard.
So he said, “There’s my ride. It’ll be two three hours, maybe a little more. And do me a favor. Stick that gun down in your pants under your shirt where you can get to it if you need to but don’t shoot any police and also if anybody else does show up, you start by assuming they’re just here to see me. Okay?”
“Hewitt. Don’t ever fuck with my gun again, you hear? I’ve had it for years and if I need it I want it all there. So okay your own self.”
THREE DAYS LATER a twenty-three-year-old boy and his sixteen-year-old girlfriend were found in a cheap motel in White River. The boy was dead, the girl unconscious. The motel owner grew uneasy because only one nigh
t had been paid for but the maid reported a DO NOT DISTURB sign dangling on the door. The room was strewn with empty prescription bottles. The dead boy had deep lacerations in his hands, some still embedded with wood splinters. The girl was taken to Dartmouth-Hitchcock where she remained in the intensive care unit. The boy had a police record dating back to junior high and was on probation at the time. The girl was clean, although no one had reported her missing. No family members of either were available for comment.
THE DROUGHT HELD, relieved by two afternoons with billowing clouds of empty promise that delivered short runoff downpours—enough to keep people mowing their lawns and that was about it. Then it was just too hot to work. “Too hot to fuck,” is what Roger Bolton said when he stopped by with a pair of young males, a red tiger and a black tiger, the ones Hewitt had requested from Emmett’s pride. Roger said the others had found homes the same way, word going out and people taking them on. The cats only knew Emmett and were terrified, backed into the wooden chicken crate and hissing as hands approached the lid. Hewitt knew he couldn’t let them live in the barn—they were house cats and the old tom in the barn would fight them into leaving. He and Jessica closed off some of the downstairs so the cats had the kitchen and pantry and living room and that was all. For the time being. They’d get used to the people and the space and slowly be allowed more of the house.
Jessica said, “What’re their names?”
“I don’t have any idea. Hell, he had a dozen or fifteen. I never knew which he was talking to, most of the time.”
“We need to name em then.”
“How bout that’s your job.”
“That’s easy. My grandmother always had tabby cats—”
“What’s a tabby cat? These are tigers.”
She frowned at him. “Whatever. The point is, during the time I knew her best she had a pair just about like this. Red and black. The red cat was named Rufus and the dark one Tom—original, I know, but that’s what she called em. And they were her best company. So, if it’s all right with you.”