Beast of the Field

by Peter Jordan Drake

  Geshen took his time answering. He lit a small cigar, flapped out the match. He didn't look at Sterno. "Didn't think you did," he said.

  "I came out here for some of mine, too." Sterno tried to keep it friendly, but Geshen Neuwald was like a statue with a working mouth. "You probably know this already, your uncle being the number one lawman in this part of the county. But all I'm after is some general information. I'm talking to everyone I can, just as quick as I can, then I'll be on my way. So if you don't mind answering just a couple questions about what you saw that night Tommy Donnan died."

  "Go ahead."

  "Actually, it’s the next morning I want to know about. A Sunday morning, if you remember, probably a lot like this one."

  Gomer returned with the mason jars, placed them on the table. He didn't bother sitting this time, but paced the floor, from the window to the table, table to window. Something outside would not let him sit.

  Geshen noticed Sterno watching his brother. He said, "Go shut those mutts up, Gomer."

  Gomer did as he was told, saying, "It's those gaw-damned wild dogs in the woods again," as he kicked the screen door open. The kitchen was completely quiet in his absence.

  At last Sterno said, "Sheriff Jake told me it was you who went to tell him about Tommy being dead. Is that right?"

  "That's right."

  "Out at his house."

  There was a pause this time. "Yep."

  "That morning?"

  This time the pause was even longer. "That's right," he said, smoking.

  Sterno thought about this. "I guess my question is, how exactly was it you came across the information, that Tommy had died? You must have been at the hotel."

  A pause, then, "Nope."

  "Well then, how did you know?"

  "Saw him."

  The two men waited. A high-pitched yelp from the barn pierced the quiet afternoon, then at last the dogs were quiet.

  "This'll be a lot easier on us both if you give me some details in your responses. Save me a lot of work."

  Geshen Neuwald sighed, dropped his elbows to the tabletop, rested his forearms on one another. Gomer opened the door, let it slap shut behind him. He flopped into an empty chair at the table, panting. His little .22 rifle clattered to the table. "Yessiree, them mongrels're back, all right," he said, craning his neck to see the woods' edge. Geshen ignored him. He was staring back at Sterno.

  "I was making a run that morning, you must know. Over to the Pawnee Reservation. I was coming back by Donnan's gate and saw the commotion. Do those details help with your investigation, Mr. Pinkerton? Are you gonna run me in to the pokey with my hooch on your breath?"

  "Not my job to go after bootleggers. I just want some help figuring out why Braun Donnan never mentioned you being out there that morning. And why it was I heard it was he himself who had to drive into town to tell the folks there. Take your time."

  But he was quick with his response. "That mick Donnan is half-blind all the time and all soaked half the time. Not to mention, his son had just been killed, and you're going to take his word over a certified man of the law? You think that a man in that state, with his wife wailing away in his ear, left with that little snoop of a daughter and one idiot son—‘hey, hey, hey,' for the rest of his miserable life—is gonna remember everybody who went driving by his road that morning and who didn't? And by the way, Mister Pinkerton, have you asked that big dope Junior where he was that night? Better make sure it wasn’t France, if you know what I mean."

  Sterno stared at him from across the kitchen. The words “had just been killed” were stuck in his mind. The smoky sweetness of his drink had faded from memory, leaving only the clarity of the liquor. He meandered around the table, no particular destination in mind. The Neuwald boys stayed in their seats. One of them kept his eye out for wild dogs in the woods, the other kept his on the Pinkerton detective in his house. Sterno reached the threshold where the kitchen met the living area and continued on a few steps. In the living area were a fireplace and some ramshackle furniture. It wasn't messy, but it was too sparsely furnished to be messy. He looked about, stepped back into the kitchen, which was filling up with cigar smoke. Then, upon a wooden shelf above and to the side of the stove, a short row of dusty frames stopped Sterno. He looked to the Neuwald brothers; Gomer had his neck craned to the window, his foot thumping the floor like a rabbit's, and Geshen was watching Sterno, simply watching him, allowing him to perform this search, daring him to find something. Sterno turned back to the frames—photos of horses, photos of family, the boys and their father with a stringer of catfish, a banner across the bottom of the photo reading "Toronto Lake, Kansas!"; then Geshen in a baseball uniform, kneeling in the front row of a baseball team photo. Sterno studied the other faces in the picture, found the one he expected to find.

  "That's Tommy Donnan, isn't it? You and Tommy pals?"

  "We weren't strangers."

  In the last photograph on the shelf, Geshen Neuwald stood in a suit and straw hat with a stiff brim. Next to him, wrist in elbow, was a beautiful young woman, a face like a diamond in the rough. She had fair hair in falling curls. She had bright eyes and wore little makeup. She wore a dress of white and carried a parasol. Behind them there was a picnic table with a pitcher of lemonade, the broad side of a barn and other similarly dressed persons. A wedding, maybe.

  "Who's the dame?" Sterno asked. He kept his eyes on the photo. He received no answer, but did hear a chair scrape on the floor. He turned to see Gomer slamming open the screen door, already cocking his .22. Geshen was rubbing out his cigar in an ashtray.

  "You got your whisky, that'll be one-dollar-fifty."

  A shot rang out from outside, followed immediately by a dog's yelp of pain. Another shot was fired. Neither man in the house flinched. Outside, far from this silence: "I got one of 'em, gawdamnit! Look at her teats! I got you didn't I, you gaw-damn mangy bitch!"

  The two men stood still while Gomer and the rest of the world whirled around them. Geshen wasn't talking anymore. Finally, Sterno reached into his pocket. He gave him the two dollars he'd asked for in the first place. "Keep it," he said. "Maybe I'll come back."

  11.

  Millie spent Saturday night in the mow with an old quilt. She refused to come inside. Finally, Junior had come up in the night, with a lunch pail of cornbread, dried apples and apricots, Pa’s rabbit jerky and his own canteen from the army full of fresh water. He sat for a long spell, just breathing, a hand on her knee as she half-slept. Eventually she turned under the blanket, scooted to the side. Junior lied back with his hands folded behind his head, still just breathing. Soon she was on her back too, head resting on her hands like he was, blinking at the roof of the barn with him.

  “Hey Junior?”

  “H-y.” Almost asleep.

  She had a million questions for him. She couldn’t choose just one. “Thanks for the grub,” she said.

  He folded one arm around her. Pretty soon he was asleep.

  When he was snoring she climbed over him and got to work; she knew it wouldn’t be long before his nightmares came. She lit the kerosene lantern to show her the arrangement of letters on the floor. They were organized by date and author, mostly, but sometimes she clustered a few of the letters together when they were written about the same thing—the same subject. Some of the letters were not as important as others, and some not important at all: boring, day-to-day stuff, how’s your day been, how’re things at the school, you’re not going to believe what happened to me at the stables today, and so on. The lovey-dovey stuff in these letters seemed to Millie to be put in because it was expected, like wiping your feet or feeding the dog. Was that what love was too? Doing day-to-day stuff every day because you’re supposed to? Did not doing them lessen the love?

  She was still figuring it out, and she was still writing her story—The Story of Two Lovey-Dovers. She walked among the letters with the lantern, from one letter to the next, squatting sometimes to bring a sentence closer to her eyes. Sometimes a
letter was important for obvious reasons, like when they began to plan their escape, but other times a letter struck her as important for reasons she did not know. Something rushed about it maybe, like there was too much left out. Or maybe something about the handwriting, or the way it was signed. (Tommy had once said to her, “You have to see what’s not spelled out for you.”) She left candles in their own wax near these letters, to mark them. She would then spend a nighttime hour or two walking among them in bare feet, standing over them, reading, remembering, feeling. Forming the story.

  And eventually it was this shape the story would take in her head—a few little flames fighting off the dark.

  My Darling Flora, Price, Kan. Oct. 1921

  Flora, my angel, my sweet darling angel. What will I do till I see you again? I curse time for its slowness, curse every foot, every inch of earth for separating us. I never would have dreamed this could happen to me, Flora. I never dreamed I would really fall in love. But oh, have I ever fallen in love with you.

  As you asked, I will come for your letters in the night. Perhaps there will come a time when it is more than a letter I take with me. Quietly to your window I will come upon my horse and take you away—if only for a stolen moment in the night. I will build my dreams on these moments until they are something real. Let us dream together, my darling Flora. We have the same dreams, the same hopes for ourselves, our lives, our homes, and even our children. Flora May, my darling, is it foolish for me to believe we can live these dreams together?

  Please dream with me.

  Sincerely, Tommy

  By this time it was a night-time affair. Millie knew now, these months later, but had not yet known then that he was going to the mayor’s house after the house was asleep. This was how they’d exchanged their letters. Millie thought it was about the stupidest thing Tommy—who she knew was really smart—had ever done in his life. Riding a horse up to a house to get a letter is not something you can do “quietly” no matter how good you are on a horse. He must have tied Sonnet to a tree and snuck up on foot, though that wouldn’t fit into the fairy tale he had going on in his mind.

  For reasons Millie was still trying to figure out, they had had to keep this love of theirs a secret. Some of it had had something to do with Junior and Miss Flora, she knew that from what happened on Valentine’s Day; but there had been another reason, a bigger reason, she felt, and she was still trying to uncover this part.

  It was the first secret Tommy ever kept from Millie. In the beginning she had had no idea what he was doing, but looking back on it now the clues were everywhere. He had seemed to be moving faster than everyone around him. He had talked louder, sang in his bedroom, laughed at the drop of a hat, helped Pa without being asked, and whistled and danced in the kitchen with Mother. He had taken Millie to school on the back of his new filly almost every day; whether she liked it or not. Miss Flora had something to do with it, she had by and by figured out; but Tommy never went a day in his life he didn’t have some girl or another on his mind, so Millie had not given it much thought, had not thought this girl was any different than any other girl. It wasn’t until he started Millie on the early morning Shakespeare—whether she liked it or not—that she had begun to realize this was something more than just some girl. Something was really taking ahold of him. He was moving around in this world, on this farm, but had begun to become obvious he was slowly and surely drifting away. Real life was suddenly not mattering to him—only his love life mattered.

  "...'Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, who is already sick and--' something else, I forget--"

  "'Pale,'" Millie mumbled. She sat next to a lantern early one morning with his gigantic Complete Works of William Shakespeare on her lap, a quilt over her shoulders. He had been out again the night before, but had still been at her bedside before the sun was up, getting her up for school. Only on this morning, like on a few others during these autumn weeks last year, he forced her up to the mow to read with him. "But you forgot a little bit of the line."

  "Ahem. '...That thou are far more fair than she.'" Tommy came down from the wooden crate he had placed upside down in the middle of the floor. "Isn't that something, Mil?"

  "What's it mean?"

  "It means…it means he's comparing Juliet to the sun, and saying she is more beautiful than the moon. He's probably comparing her to Diana, the goddess of the moon."

  "More beautiful than the moon? Not me. I like the moon better than that hot ol’ sun."

  "Well, you're not a love-struck Italian teenager either. You're nothing but a prairie dog, a dirty little rodent, rooting around in the ground."

  "The sun looks different in Italy than it does in Kansas?"

  "What a pain in the neck you are. Aren't you reading any Shakespeare at school?"

  From the book strap at her side, Millie pulled a tattered book with a faded cover, held together in some points with string. "We're reading this," she said.

  He took the reader from her, holding it like a used handkerchief. He held it up to the lanternlight. "'Little Women?'" He groaned. "How do you stand it?"

  "I asked her if I could read it," Millie snapped. She snatched the book from his hand. "It's what the older kids are reading. We aint got any books for kids my age, Mister Snobby, so I asked her myself for this one. She has to read to the kids my age, because we only have one of every book until they get that new schoolhouse done."

  Tommy heaved the Shakespeare from her lap, went back to his stage. "'We aint got no gawl-dang books,'" he said. “Why do you talk like such a yokel when I know you don’t think like one?”

  “You don’t know how I think, mister.”

  “Oh yes I do. You think like I.” He was searching the heavy volume for a good line. "Hey, listen to this one. This is Cleopatra talking...." He put on a woman's voice and fell back against a beam with the heel of his wrist to his forehead. "'Give me my robe, put on my crown. I have immortal longings in me.'"

  "Hey, that one’s not bad. What's it mean? She's gonna die?"

  "Yes, sort of, but we're all going to die. It means a lot more than that. It means she's going to kill herself, too. It also means she understands how small life is, and how grand and forever death is. And how some of us are a lot more important after we die than we ever were when we were alive." He slapped the book shut, leapt down from the crate. "Now let's get going, it's time for school."

  "You're taking me again, aint you?"

  "'Aren't,' soldier—it's 'aren't.' And yes I am. I think maybe I need to have a talk with this school teacher of yours about this tripe she's got you studying. Who is it, anyway, that crusty old crone Miller still?"

  "You know good and goddamn well it aint Mrs. Miller," Millie said, pushing past him to the trap door with her book strap under her arm.

  *

  The letters went back and forth through the autumn and into the winter, each one stickier than the one before it. Maybe it was the schoolhouse and all those squirrely, love-sick girls that had put a spell over Miss Flora, but her letters were full of “XOXOXO” stuff and “LOVELOVELOVE” stuff and wild punctuation marks and sing-songy words that should come from one of those girls in the upper classes, like Ada Wilkes, with her little corkscrew hair pieces hanging down and her breathy voice, not a teacher (though, to be fair, Miss Flora was barely in her twenties).

  It was enough to make Millie want to be a nun. It was like Miss Flora was in a play too, playing the part of a woman who was exactly what men wanted her to be. At dances she wore catalogue dresses and bobbed her hair and painted her face and sipped from flasks and in her daylight hours it was limp gingham and washerwoman shoes and her bobbed hair in a tight knot behind her head and no makeup at all. In these letters, she was a teenage girl, reading a love story and putting herself inside it, dizzy and starry-eyed over the handsome horse champion with the icy blue eyes who wants to whisk her away.

  Hell, Millie thought, maybe women ought not to have the vote. What good is it if we’re just going to do exact
ly what men want us to do anyway?

  Still, there was something about her that turned Tommy into a little boy. Shy. Quiet. When he took Millie to school, he never brought Millie right up to the schoolhouse. When they rounded the site where new brick school building and the old wooden schoolhouse came into view, he reined the filly back, moved her along the other side of the building frame to the woods than ran along the backside of both schools, old and new, stopped there just inside the trees staring at the schoolhouse with his hands crossed on the pommel of the saddle. He wouldn't go any closer. Couldn't: so it was in glimpses he saw her—tromping across a window, standing at the entrance, staring at her through the fog and bare branches while she readied the privy behind the schoolhouse. She imagined him collecting these parts of her and using them to build something bigger and a little different than the real thing, like she had done with Junior’s letters.

  Pretty soon it had been every day that Millie would look through the windows and catch a glimpse of that black-brown filly in the woods. It was every night he was leaving the house. Creeping by her bedroom door with his boots in his hand. Baiting and tacking up the new filly—Peaceful Sonnet, he’d named her—in the pitch black darkness of the barn, then walking her out to the twin elms before mounting her and racing down the road towards town.

  Every night, she had laid in her bed thinking: The sneaky sonbitch, who’s he think he’s fooling? Her ear would be tuned to the creaking floorboards outside her bedroom door, and when she heard them she was at the window before she was awake, watching the sneak sneaking around in the night with his secrets. At the time it had made her red-in-the-face mad; even through all that had happened she still remembered how mad at him she had been. Keeping a secret from her was one thing, but a secret involving a girl was more than she could allow.