by Van Reid
Daniel had been practicing law for three years when he first saw the Willums, and he often thought of that first sight of Asher and Jeram years later, having more or less forgotten it for more than a decade.
The two boys stood out, in the larger sense of Hiram’s community, for contradictory and even complex reasons. Neither was stupid in the sense of having been born without native wit or capability; Asher in fact conveyed a keen sense of humor (“the surest sign, of intelligence, “someone had once told Daniel), and though that humor was often simmering just below the level of cruelty, people occasionally saw a flash of something unsullied by the general course of Asher’s dark nature. The boy was always handsome, and as he grew to manhood, he made no mystery of either his interest in the fairer sex or his intention to use that handsome face in his pursuits. Daniel would always think of him as a wolf, not simply the fairy-tale despoiler of maidens but a true creature of the woods: flashing teeth, wild ways, beautiful, dangerous.
The other boy was of a nature so contrary, even to his own clan, that some suggested Elizabeth Willum had been “jumping the fence.” “Jeram’s manner was the butt of some humor, though he carried himself with a strange sort of dignity that Daniel admired. Aunt Dora at the Linnett house said Jeram was fey, and there was something otherwordly about him; he was slim and delicate in appearance, and even his features were too fine to be handsome.
Jeram was unaware of anything different about himself or consciously avoided thinking on it; instead he spent as much time in school as fate and his family would allow. He was an attentive student and soaked up his erratic studies; but one day he stopped coming altogether, and though the boy puzzled him greatly, the schoolmaster took it upon himself to inquire after Jeram at the Willum place. Parley Willum nearly took a stick to the man, claiming the schooling had made the boy strange and swearing that never would a “Willum darken the schoolhouse door again!”
The boy was seldom seen after that, though his brother was often among the layabouts on the village common or playing at jackdaws and mumblety-peg on the porch of the general store. As a young man Asher had the dash of an army officer swathed in anarchic energy; few women in town had not at least taken note of those clear blue eyes, though most were quickly taken aback by their clarity of intent. Two or three young girls soared too close to this son, and at least one had spent some requisite months with relatives in another town.
Daniel Plainway was busy in those years, increasing his practice, joining the cogs of town politics, spending pleasant evenings and Sunday afternoons at the Linnett estate. He thought very little about the Willum boys (or the Willums in general when there wasn’t a pertinent court case pending) till the day Clayton Bond told Daniel he’d seen Jeram Willum and Nell Linnett sitting together beneath an apple tree down by Ten Mile River.
12. The Quiescent Incarceration of Tom Bull
Sheriff Piper led Daniel Plainway into the jail end of the building on Federal Street, and they were immediately enveloped by the breath of cold stone, though a stove banged and ticked away on the other side of the guard room. Daniel was a little surprised to find a woman at the door to the cells, a lamp on the table beside her and a book in her lap. There was a shotgun leaning in the corner behind her.
“Good afternoon, Charles,” said the woman. She took off her spectacles. “Sir,” she said to Daniel.
“This is Mrs. Patterson, Mr. Plainway,” said the sheriff.
“I am pleased to meet you, ma’am,” said Daniel.
“Seth’s brother has been sick, and I sent him down with a howl of stew and a poultice,”she explained.
“This is Mr. Plainway, Laura. We’ve come to get a glimpse oft om.”
“He’s not hard to sight,” said the woman. She retrieved a ring of keys from the wall opposite the door to the cells. If she was curious about Daniel and why he wanted a look at their prisoner, she said nothing, which was just as well since Daniel was surprised that they wanted a glimpse of anyone.
As a lawyer Daniel was not unfamiliar with jails and their occupants both the keepers and the condemned-but for all his experience he could not suppress a shudder whenever he heard the guard door shut behind him. They had entered a narrow, poorly lit hall, which was flanked by several heavy doors and barred apertures. Daniel heard someone humming a familiar tune. a stove burned with a reddish glow at the other end, and the heat it gave off was enough to ward off the cold if a person was bundled up or at physical labor.
“We have two guests at the moment,” said the sheriff, his tone neither cruel nor bitter. Daniel knew that Piper was only speaking with a sort of practical wryness that allowed him to keep a certain essential distance from the men he had incarcerated. “How are you, Jep?” he asked of a fellow who sat in a chair by the aperture nearest the stove.
The man stopped humming to say, “Pretty well, Sheriff, thank you.” He was indeed dressed in coat and hat. He held his hands quietly in his lap, and he stared forward, as if he were watching something of great interest. “Mr. Patterson’s brother has been poorly, I understand.”
“This is Mr. Plainway,” said Piper. “We’ve come to see Tom.”
“Oh?” said the man behind bars, and they might have been back at the barbershop, talking pleasantly, there was so little inflection in what they said. Daniel knew, from reading the papers, that this was the suspect in the sensational case presently on trial, a man who had been accused of murdering his best friend. Jep recommenced his humming, and Daniel listened as he tried to place the tune.
The first thing that the sheriff did was to check the stove and stoke it up well with coal. Jep merely nodded his appreciation, hardly blinking as he stared forward. On the other side of the corridor Piper approached another set of bars and peered in. Daniel stepped up to look past the sheriff.
He had expected a second man to be close to the bars as well, but what he could make out, after his eyes adjusted to the dark, was an enormous dark form in the coldest corner of the room. There was straw on the floor and blankets on a bench, which stood perpendicular to the hall. a low table and a stout chair occupied the center of the room. Beyond this there was only the dim mass of some large man, watching without apparent interest from the furthest corner of his cell.
“Good afternoon, Tom,” called the sheriff. He turned to Daniel, as he was not expecting a reply (nor did he receive one). “They call him Tom Bull,” he said to Daniel. “It took ten or twelve good men to catch him, subdue him, and bring him in. He’s here till next spring, but I don’t know that letting him out will be doing him a favor.”
Daniel moved closer to the bars and peered after the man, feeling conspicuously like the patron of a zoo, not the least because the man inside the cell seemed like some great placid creature of the wild.
“You don’t recognize him?” asked the sheriff.
Daniel shook his head. “Should I?”
“He was one of the crew from whom the boy was rescued,” explained Piper.
Nell’s little boy, thought Daniel, and something cold gripped his stomach. In his mind he tried to place a four-year-old child in the company of such a creature as this; there was something so strange and animallike about the man as he sat blinking at them. Jep, across the corridor, hummed his tune. Tom Bull startled Daniel by lifting a huge arm and scratching himself behind the ear.
“He wasn’t the worst of them, by far,” the sheriff was saying. “Tweed was the man to contend with.”
“And this Mister Walton knocked him down with a single shot?”
“He did at that Tweed is in Portland now, where he has some hard questions to answer regarding several other cases. Once we caught him, it seems everyone wanted him.”
“And Mr. Bull?”
“Him they were happy to let us keep.”
Daniel looked back at Jep for a moment, still trying to place the tune the man hummed. Returning his gaze to the man in the shadowy and cold corner of his cell, he said, “He seems calm enough.”
“Like a sleep
y horse ever since we got him here. He let us take him to the courthouse and back without a word or a struggle.”
“Perhaps he didn’t like the company himself,” said Daniel.
“Don’t be thinking too highly of him. He once offered to bust Sundry Moss’s head with a rock. And he broke a piece of lumber over Wyckford O’Hearn’s back.”
“It’s a wonder the man wasn’t killed!”
“O’Hearn was good for it. He swung about and put old Tom on his knees with a single blow. That was in the cellar hole, where Wyckford first rescued the boy.”
Daniel strained his eyes at the dark corner again and made out the face of the giant. That great placid face took on a more sinister aspect now. “I must meet these people,” said Daniel. “So much is owed them.”
“I think they feel paid up,” said the sheriff. “But something tells me you’ll be meeting them soon enough.”
In the wordless moment that followed, the tuneful humming from the other side of the aisle gained precedence to the ear. The accused murderer had not moved from his seat or altered his posture.
“What is that tune?” Daniel asked of Jep.
Jep paused in his humming and thought. “I can’t recall. But I’ve always liked it.”
“I do too,” said Daniel. “It’s a lullaby, I think.”
“Is it? I can hum anything that I’ve heard once,” said the prisoner, “but I have a great talent for not remembering the name of a tune.”
“Yes,” returned Daniel, as if they all were back at the barbershop, having their hair cut. “I was just saying the other day how amazed I am at the number of people who have a rare gift for something.”
13. Startling Circumstances at the Abode of Mr. Thole
By the end of the nineteenth century a swath almost fifty miles wide along the coast of Maine was all but deforested in the name of settlement and cultivation, shipbuilding and commerce, and nowhere was this more evident than on the line of the Maine Central Railroad as it followed the Kennebec. Small groves occasionally stood at the back end of a farm, and magnificent maples and oaks and elms lent character to homes along the way, but particularly during the winter the thousand hills and those valleys tributary to the great river lay, beneath their weight of snow, as bald as a plain and as white as the moon.
The sky that morning was uncluttered. The sun dazzled the white fields, and even in the car people were squinting.
There were many stops along the way, and as the stations fell behind, the male portion of the Covington party began to rouse itself from lethargy; only Mrs. Covington had remained wakeful. Hunger was not a small factor in this metamorphosis, and long before the hour of noon Mister Walton and Sundry had shared out some fine edibles from the hamper supplied by Mrs. Baffin. The Covingtons were greatly impressed by the woman, though they had never met her, and never more so than when Sundry produced a mince pie from the basket.
Other folk nearby were let in on some of this feast, and Sundry remarked how sad “those blond fellows” might be if they had only known what they were missing.
“It is punishment enough, I think,” declared Frederick, but his wife said nothing. Indeed, Sundry wondered if her expression hadn’t darkened at the mere mention of the pickpockets. All in all, with the bright day and the view of the river, not to mention the company, Sundry had imagined that the unpleasantness caused by those two fellows was all but forgotten.
Mister Walton was tempted to make a brief sojourn at the Hallowell station when they got there, if only to stretch his legs as an excuse to glimpse the riverside portion of town. Somewhere past Gardiner, however, he decided to forgo this indulgence; the thought of seeing Hollowell without the attendant sight of Miss McCannon was too melancholy.
Soon after this stop the dome of the capitol building made fleeting appearances, and when they climbed a short grade the entire building, as well as the Blaine House, came into view. There was a stop below these appearances, and when they climbed a short grade the entire building, as sights, but then, the train entered the residential ward of the city. The remains of lunch were hardly put away when the whistle blew and the train slowed for the next stop.
Here was the busiest station they had come to since leaving Portland. There were passengers departing and boarding, wagons waiting for cargo and mail coaches along the sidings. Sundry was the first of their party of the train, and once he had handed Mrs. Covington down, he led the way to the station house in search of a porter. Frederick Covington went directly to the baggage car, from which Moxie bounded with a happy bark as soon as the door was rolled open.
It was such a lovely day that Mister Walton and Isabelle pressed through to the street side of the station house and waited on the steps in the brisk air. Sundry joined them in a minute with news of their things, and a man walked up to them and asked Mister Walton if he were Frederick Covington.
“I have not that distinction, sir,” said Mister Walton, “but this is Mrs. Covington.”
“How do you do,” said she, and put out her hand.
The man took her hand briefly and gave a slight nod. He was of medium height and very businessy-looking with a camel hair coat that was opened to reveal a dark suit and a handsome watch fob hung in a practiced loop. He wore a dark round hat and wore brushy mustaches that moved when he spoke. “I am Herman Thole,” he informed them.
“Mr. Thole!” said the woman, obviously surprised. “I didn’t expect you to meet us at the station.”
“Didn’t you?” he said, sounding surprised.
“This is the gentleman with the photographs,” she explained to Mister Walton and Sundry.
Mr. Thole seemed more surprised still when a porter arrived with a loaded handcart. “Are these your bags?” he asked.
Moxie appeared around the corner of the station, quickly followed by Frederick. “Good morning,” said Frederick on his approach. “It isn’t afternoon yet, is it?”
“This is my husband,” said Isabelle.
“Frederick Covington,” said the clergyman, and he took Thole’s hand firmly. “How nice of you to meet us, Mr. Thole,” he said when the man was introduced.
“Nice?” said Thole, and his eyebrows nearly met over his nose. “Your telegram was nothing if not adamant that I did meet you!”
“Telegram?”
“Your telegram from Portland station this morning.”
“I didn’t send a telegram,” said Frederick.
“This morning?”
“Not this morning, not from Portland station. My correspondence with you has been by letter alone.”
“But the telegram,” said the man. He found a piece of paper in his coat pocket and handed it to Frederick.
Covington considered this with a frown, a single sound of surprise.
“I’ve been here two hours,” Thole was saying, and he did not sound happy about it. “Couldn’t imagine what you wanted.”
Frederick handed the telegram to his wife. “Good heavens!” she said when she had read it.
“You didn’t send it?” said Thole. “But what does that mean?”
“It means that I might have guessed it,” said Covington. Mister Walton and Sundry were startled by the almost bitter sound in his voice.
“But it says urgent,” continued Thole.
“It is, I’m afraid,” said Frederick. “We must get to your house as soon as possible.”
“But that is what I thought you were going to do, before the telegram.”
“I didn’t send the telegram,” said Frederick. “We must move quickly! Mister Walton, Mr. Moss?”
“Shall we come along?” asked Mister Walton.
“By all means, but please be quick.”
“And our bags?”
“Let us leave them here,” he said to the porter. Already he was hurrying down the steps of the station. “Do you have a carriage, Mr. Thole?”
“With the chestnut mare.”
Even the dog seemed to understand the need for haste, for she was the first in
the carriage. The mare turned her head at the odd sensation that Moxie’s boarding caused through the carriage harness.
In another moment the mare was trotting up the slope of State Street, none too fast to judge by Frederick Covington’s expression. Moxie lay at their feet, making a very pleasant foot warmer. Mister Walton, perplexed but quiet about it, sat opposite the man and wife.
“Our friends would perhaps like to know what was happening,” said Isabelle, with that insistent tone returning to her voice.
“I beg your pardon,” said Frederick. He had the telegram in hand, and he unfolded it before giving it to Mister Walton.
GRAND TRUNK TELEGRAPH COMPANY
Portland. Maine
DEC 4 AM 7:43
AUGUSTA. MAINE
MR HERMAN THOLE
14 CHURCH ST
URGENT YOU MEET WITH US AT STATION. ARRIVING 10:10 OR
11:40.
COVINGTON
“It is very strange,” said Mister Walton.
“Yes,” said Covington slowly, though he seemed to contradict himself with his manner. His wife glanced from Mister Walton and Sundry to her husband, clearly thinking that more explanation was due their companions.
“It’s not far now,” said Thole, who was driving. They passed handsome houses on either side, and a gray church occupied the corner where they turned.
When they pulled into the yard of a large colonial house, Covington was the first from the carriage. Thole had every intention of bringing horse and carriage into his barn till he glanced at the clergyman, who was waiting on the walk; then Thole hopped down and threw a rein over a hitching post. “Please, come in,” he said, though uncertainly.
“The room where you keep your photographs,” said Frederick.
They entered a wide hallway beside a flight of stairs. From the wall of the landing above glared the portrait of a hawk-nosed man. In the first elaborately furnished room they came to there was a stand in one corner, and the drawer in it was opened, to Mr. Thole’s surprise. He considered this for a moment before shutting the drawer.