BEAST OF THE FIELD
a novel by Peter Jordan Drake
Beast of the Field, written by Peter Jordan Drake
www.peterjordandrake.com
www.beastofthefieldnovel.com
Contact author at: [email protected]
Copyright 2012 by Peter Jordan Drake
ASIN: B00744EEM0
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the author.
Acknowledgements: I am very grateful to Carol, Shelley, Stephanie, Cecelia, Maren and Lita for multiple readings and much editing—old fashioned devourers of books are they, and their input was invaluable. To Dad, Mom, Aunt Tessie and, posthumously, Aunt Ada and my grandmother, Alice Drake, for keeping this story all these years and then entrusting it to me. To Howie, for publishing the reader's editions of this work in its earlier forms, and for his insight in all matters pertaining to the 1920s, farm life, and buggy mechanics. To William Callahan for his guidance, and also to my brother Jeff for website help.
Mostly I would like to thank my wife Sarah, for the years of hard work, faith and love that in all ways made this novel possible.
Part I
1.
The girl led her brother across the field by two of his fingers, one arm strained straight back to him while the other arm swung before her with each step she took through the high grass. Every so often she would turn her body to face him, grab his hand with both of hers and urge him forward with a stream of curses that brought his boots off the ground with new purpose. Mostly, she kept her head down, her eyes on the bank of elms and cottonwoods running along the dry creek in front of them. Beyond this shade was another field made up of the same stuff as this one: alfalfa, clover, timothy, golden rod and wild growing wheat, all to be threshed down and baled up by her father next week. Bordering the south end of the next field was a two-rutted farm road, a dirty dog-tail hanging off the new state highway which ran all the way from Missouri into Hope County, skimmed the northeast corner of the town of Price, cut straight north and then ended without warning a handful of miles short of her father's farm. The dirt road was where she was heading. She would sit there all night if that's what it took, for she was set dead on being the first one in town to see the Pinkerton man.
"Come on, goddamnit. Will you come on?"
He wore homemade overalls of denim, his boots from the Great War and a stiff new field hat he treated with the same soft touch he used with caterpillars and chicks. Though he could be gentle with them, the two fingers his sister held were thick and rough as rope. He outweighed his younger sister by over two-hundred pounds but kept pace behind her with a soldier's sense of duty. He was thick with a layer of muscle and a layer of fat all over his body, mostly muscle though his flannel and overalls gave the impression it was the other. His pebbly face was big even for his huge frame, and baked dry from his long days in the field, but set in this landscape were his mother's praying green eyes and long lashes, which he blinked in delight at the dipping monarchs all around him as he was led through the hay.
In front of him the girl’s yellow hair lit up in the early evening sunlight the same as the tufts of wheat and the blurring wings of flies. She wore a simple, thinning cotton dress that had been white once and no undergarments, although she was getting to that age. Her face was tiny beneath her wild hair, freckled along the cheekbones, pointy in the chin and nose, and was pleasant, elfin, almost gleeful when she smiled. Her eyes were neither her father's blue nor her mother's green, but both, and this sea-like color held the day's light long into dusk. But when she was feeling surly, as now, her brow took on severe furrows and her chin puckered up underneath her mouth and she could be, according to her mother anyway, downright ugly. On her feet she wore cowboy-style boots made for a man, once worn by her brother, the dead one. She wore them without socks, every day, for chores, for play and for supper. The fresh daily batch of blisters her feet got sliding round in them and the sores she got on the fronts and backs of her knees from the flapping leather meant nothing to her: they were her brother's boots.
At last they reached the shade of the creek, where she could at least see a car coming on the road, if there was a car to see. She decided it was okay if they stopped to rest. Her brother looked into the creek bed for a drink of water that was not there before sitting next to her on a fallen tree. The trees took the wind for them so they could speak without shouting, though it was only the girl who spoke. "He told Pa around supper time, so he ought to be coming along soon enough. I got to rest,” she said, peering through the leaves toward the road. So they waited. Above them the trees bucked under a powerful gust, hushing the buzzing cicadas for a moment and bringing some of the first dry leaves of the coming season twirling to the ground. After a silence, she shot her brother a look and said, "I'll get going when I'm good and ready to get going, and not one second sooner."
On the other side of the creek the field was smaller, or looked that way for the line of telephone and telegraph wires marking the road. It was still big. The girl fixed her gaze on one of these poles, set her course.
“Now get up off your duff.”
When they reached the road she used her hand for shade, searched the distances. The road reached flat and straight into town. She could barely see the steeple of the German Lutheran Church and the dark low rises of the oldest trees and the crops on either side of the road between here and there, but no car. Cursing, she re-tread her steps back across the field to where the trees threw some shade. She plopped down to her behind, sat Indian-style, pulled up weeds. Her brother sat next to her.
"Supper time, my ass," she said.
They sat like this for a good while before he rose to his feet, his head turned to the road. The sun was gone behind the trees but the light was still good. The girl craned her neck and after a second or two saw a wisp of dust rising up from a distant corn field before being taken away on the wind. It could have been a dust devil or the steam plume from a train the way it moved along the tops of the corn stalks. She tracked its progress. She made sure it was coming towards them.
"Sonbitch, he's moving, aint he? Come on, we gotta go fast. Lift me up to your shoulders, so we can go catch him," she said, yanking on his arm. "I swear to God, you got better ears than Jumpy. Now lift me up, would'ya?"
He slouched one shoulder, turned his elbow out, offered her four hooked fingers as a stirrup. She tucked her dress under her crotch from behind like a diaper, stepped into his hand, swung her other leg around his shoulder when he lifted her high enough and tucked her foot and ankle under his arm. Did the same with the other foot on the other side. She said, "Git," and he started to jog across the field. "Get the rocks out of your drawers, Junior! Go, go, go!"
The car was barreling straight at them now through shimmers of heat and was framed by its own wake of rolling dirt. Her heels cinched into his ribs again because the car was already near the turn in the road and they were only halfway across the field. She waved her arms up over her head and was hollering at the car and waving her arms and hollering and waving her arms. In the bouncing motion of his galloping her cotton saddle came unfurled to be caught by the wind and blown with her hair over her head and in front of her. The forward motion of his efforts challenged the blowing wind from behind and caught in the middle was the girl’s dress, hovering overhead in the sunset with her arms and hair and voice.
The car, a Model T, reached the turn in the road moving too fast, nearly went off the road, then found the road again as it took him away from them, westward toward the farm. Inside the car, she could see the face of the driver turned to look at them. Wi
th the brim of his fedora down over his eyes all she could make out was his mouth hanging open as he watched them draw nearer. He then turned back to the road for he had nearly veered off it again. She heard the grinding sound of a gear and the pop and rev of the engine as he stepped on the floorboard with the gas pedal. The car was gone then, a shape in the dust storm it took with it on the road—and they had just reached the road.
The brother, huffing, stopped in the middle of the road. They stood there, she atop his shoulders, squinting at the dust and the shrinking car. She dismounted, taking his hat with her. Once on her own feet again, she slapped his hat down to the road in front of her, cursed loudly and vilely, stood staring.
"Sonbitch, I can't believe it," she said after a moment. Her voice was calmer now, thoughtful. "He looked right at us."
He picked up his hat, carefully, thoroughly cleaned it off. He was breathing hard.
"Didn't he hear us? Didn't he see us?" she said.
But he was walking back to the farm already, leaving his sister standing there, her face pulled up around her eyes against the sinking sun.
"How do you like that? Those sonbitches sent us a blind detective," the girl said, and now she was moving too. She spat into the dust before her, shook her head as she walked. "What in hell kind of chance we got with a detective't can't see two feet in front of his face? I ask you."
They were together alone on the road now. The dust was gone and the car was gone and there was nothing but the girl and her brother. She walked in his footsteps, and from the east woods it looked like one silhouette and one long shadow against the orange sun.
2.
According to the guys at the St. Louis office, the legend went something like this:
Once upon a time there was a sweet Missouri breeze that went astray and ended up over its western border, it took one look around and all of the sudden got in a big goddamn hurry to get somewhere else, anywhere else. It's windy as hell there, they'd warned him; but he never expected anything so strong as to lift his car from the ruts in the road and move it in a different direction.
Charlie Sterno fought to stay on the road with his hands, arms, shoulders, legs and body like a man in a boat puts his sail against a squall. Leaning like this against the pull of his steering wheel, Sterno brought the Ford out of the slight protection offered him by a cornfield to be surrounded instead by hay. Instantly, a gust of wind slammed into the car like it was trying to run him back to where he belonged. He steadied her and was plodding along the road doing all right until something in the field off his left side made him start. He ran off the dirt road for a few feet before righting the Ford again.
"What in the name of...?"
It was coming out of the sun, running through the tall grass towards the road. In the sun-blinded half-second glimpse he had to look at it before nearly going off the road his squinting, blinking eyes saw it in pieces—something wrong-shaped, too skinny on the top half, huge around the legs, the wild hair of a witch on the tiny head of a skeleton, white rags floating against the sun, four arms, one on another on each side, the top arms waving in the air and the bottom ones pumping, tree trunk legs pounding the ground as it came nearer to the car.
Then the tires came out of the ruts again, and the car began to tip over on its side. Sterno wrenched the wheel to the left, ratcheted her into a lower gear and stepped on the gas, sending the car lurching forward. Through his door mirror he tried to get a look at the thing coming out of the field. He wasn't sure for the bumpy road and the shaking mirror, but he thought it was nothing but a boney little girl on the shoulders of a man the size of a grizzly bear.
Sterno bumped up the brim of his fedora, scratched his forehead, chuckled to himself. He thought about stopping, turning back; but it was too late, he was making good speed with what was now a tail wind, and besides, he had already gone too far.
*
Charlie Sterno had been dispatched to this case partly because he had handled this sort of investigations before. He counted himself as lucky. Many of the other detectives at the agency were not detectives at all; they were guarding banks or busting up picket lines. Some of them were bodyguards and many of them were out of work, as the Federal men were branching out. Less and less, the Pinkertons were being used for missing persons and murder cases. But in these rural areas where Washington couldn't yet reach, and with these small town lawmen no one could touch, Pinkerton was still the only name in private investigation. And it was for this Sterno counted himself as lucky. Truth was, in the eyes of his superiors, Charlie Sterno was simply no longer the man he used to be. He was slow to move, ill-humored, sometimes overtly sad in the presence of the other men, as if still grieving all these years later. He spent long hours in the office staring at nothing, producing nothing, partaking in nothing. His heart was not behind the Pinkerton credo in any other aspect of Pinkerton work except, perhaps, when the rare occasion arose, this one: Always Getting His Man. It was the established institutions of criminality and peace keeping distilled down to individuals, which was the only thing that made sense to Sterno anymore, the only thing that motivated him: the worst crimes were personal matters, so too then should be solving them. Under the circumstances they understood, his colleagues and superiors, but they didn’t like it, and felt obligated to suffer him, to find uses for him, and to not fire him. When the letters had come from some outlying field town called Price, Kansas about a suspicious death of a young buggy racer, there was not much discussion as to who would be sent.
For his part, Sterno was well aware of his standing at the office, but did not care. Lawlessness was taking over the country. The law was losing. Sterno himself was already lost. He’d lost his way with everything else in the world that mattered to him, gone on the stained mattress of their wedding bed that cold morning all those years ago. Her gray sheened face, finally at rest after so many hours of the worst pain a person could endure, the cracked whites of her eyes pointed at the ceiling, and the streaked, filmy, sheet-swaddled bundle laid to her breast for all time by the Negro laundry woman who had heard his calls through the pre-dawn freezing rain. She had tried to wrap it before he saw it. She had tried to be at once tender and fast. It would be five years this winter, a long time, but it was yesterday in his mind, this morning in his mind, still happening now in his mind.
For him there was only the job, and there was barely that. Still, a job to do was better than nothing. It was better than mirthless, crowded St. Louis, better than the mirthless, mindless goings-on of the office and better than the empty home—empty when he was gone, empty when he was home. So at this moment he was quite pleased to be far from St. Louis with his grumping flivver, his tinned food and a case to occupy his thoughts. A job to do.
The old man, Donnan was his name, had written to look for twin elms where the gate to the farm would be. He would know them because one of the trees was in full leaf and the other was dying. Dead as a doornail was closer to the truth, Sterno thought as he approached the elms.
He turned in to the dirt road between the trees, brought the car to a stop next to a slat-backed Ford pickup. The farm looked like a thousand farms: black shingled roof, white painted walls, outdoor privy, hay barn the size of an airship, animal pens, wilting garden and squared-off fields to the horizon.
He got out of the car, stretched. Charlie Sterno wasn't a big man or a little man, he was narrow under his clothes but strong. He used to be, anyway. Strong. His eyes were black as sapphires and didn't miss a thing, not even after the whisky. What most people noticed first about Charlie Sterno was his jaw, which stuck out hugely at the cheeks and the chin like something a newspaper cartoonist would draw.
He saw the old man on the porch watching him. The man was bent and burnt from his work. A little walking-stick of a man who used his own knotted stick against a limp as he made his way down the steps towards the car. As he came closer, Sterno thought for a second he'd actually seen a farmer smile, when truth was the old man was wincing with the effort of walki
ng.
"Hidy. You hold up okay on that road?" he asked, shaking Sterno's hand with vigor. They made introductions. The man broke off from the greeting to limp around the car in way of inspection. "This a eighteen model? a nineteen? Well, she helt up just fine. Yep, just fine, it looks—this tire's a little low, here. God knows that rocky old road beats up the best of them."
"Wasn't the road I was worried about," he said, and to his point a gust of wind shook the car.
"Oh. Yeah, well, that wind. Usually it dies down in the evening time, by now, anyways. Makes for some nice sunset watching when it does, all our good topsoil flying around in the air." For the first time the old man took a good look at Sterno. "So you're the one they sent, huh? Dang mister..." he said, but nothing more. Sterno saw that the man was looking at his jaw. He must have made a joke to himself in his head, because he suddenly began to laugh. His laugh sounded like a quiet, strained heck-heck-heck! He got on his stick and met Sterno at the front of the car. "So you're the one they sent," he said again, more to himself. He stood there without moving or speaking for nearly half a minute. His little tuft of white hair flopped back and forth in the wind like a signal flag. After some thought, he straightened his spine, said, "Welp, Mother's been at it all day. How about coming inside and greasing up that chin a yours."
They made their way to the porch, but lying against the house was an old hound, teeth bared and growling as a matter of duty.
"Easy, Jumpy," Donnan said. "Don't mind Jumpy. An old switchyard dog. Old when we got him. Can't smell for shit anymore, can't see for shit, but ears like a jackrabbit."
Watching the old boy get to his feet was like watching a barn-raising. By the time he was finally on his fours he had forgotten to be mean. Instead, he moped directly over to Sterno, stuck his black snout where the man's legs met.
Beast of the Field Page 1