Wrack and Rune

by Charlotte MacLeod

For a wedding present Tim had handed Laurie his checkbook, waved a hand around the fine old house his late wife had so dismally neglected, and said, “Fix it up to suit yourself.” Roy and Laurie were spending a glorious summer obeying their father’s wish. They’d picked out a living room carpet in a wavelike design of blues and greens. They’d bought white leather furniture that loomed up like a field of midget icebergs from the sea of blue-green shag to remind them of those halcyon days when love had bloomed on the Ross Sea. They’d selected wallpaper with a design of diatoms and coelacanths. They’d done over Tim’s bedroom and study in earth tones of umber, ocher, and terracotta to make him feel truly at home. Their own bedroom had a frieze of Emperor penguins and a pinup poster of Jacques Cousteau.

  The kids had also got a car which they were paying for out of their own meager stipends because they didn’t want to take unfair advantage of Tim’s generosity. The clunker once driven by Jemima Ames and later, briefly, by the infamous Lorene McSpee had flunked its last sticker test and been reduced to a foot or two of squashed recyclement. Now President Svenson had undisputed possession of the crummiest car in Balaclava County.

  “I do think it’s sweet that Laurie and Roy are taking such marvelous care of Tim,” Helen remarked as she reached for another petunia.

  “Tim’s taking pretty damn good care of them if you ask me,” Peter grunted, forking in a handful of 5-10-5. “Where are they all off to today?”

  “Laurie wanted to look at more wallpapers. She and Roy dropped Tim off at some old farmer’s over in Lumpkin Corners and they’re going to pick him up on the way back. I wonder if he took his soil auger with him? Darling, do you remember back in May when we had that gaggle of visiting congressmen up at College? Tim came wandering by with that huge drill in his hand, almost as tall as himself, and one of the congressmen asked him what he used it for.”

  “And Tim said, ‘Constipation.’ That’s what is known as a Great Moment in History, my love. Would we happen to have any cold beer in the house?”

  “Yes, but you’re not getting any till we finish planting this border. You’ll just get besotted and pass out in the hammock. Take a slurp of water from the hose if you’re thirsty.”

  “What am I, a petunia? Strong men need strong drink. Is that the telephone I hear?”

  “If it is, I’ll answer it. I don’t trust you alone with the fridge.” Helen brushed peat moss off the knees of her gardening pants and went into the charming little brick house of which she had been chatelaine for six intermittently halcyon months. The telephone was indeed ringing and the voice on the wire was Tim’s. He was, she realized at once, in a dreadful taking.

  “Pete, get out here!”

  “It isn’t Pete,” she screamed. “What’s the matter, Tim? Where are you?”

  All she received for an answer was, “Get Pete!” She could still hear him yelling the same words over as she laid down the phone and rushed to the front door.

  “Peter, come quickly. It’s Tim and he’s frantic.”

  “What about?”

  “He won’t tell me. He just keeps howling for you.”

  Shandy was in the house and at the telephone in three bounds. “Tim,” he bellowed over the tumult, “what’s wrong?”

  Helen stood by, watching her husband’s face slowly lose color as he listened. “Okay, Tim,” he shouted at last, “I’m on my way,” and hung up.

  “What is it, Peter? Roy hasn’t had an accident with their new car?”

  “No, nothing like that. Tim’s out at Henny Horsefall’s. Henny’s hired man just got burned to death by quicklime.”

  “Quicklime? That’s ghastly! But how?”

  “That’s what Tim wants me out there for. Henny claims there was no quicklime on the place and hadn’t been since God knows when. No damn reason why there should have been. Helen, I’ve got to go right this minute. There’s no telling when Roy and Laurie will show up. Henny’s over eighty and he has nobody else left on the place but an aunt who’s going to be a hundred and five next week.”

  “Then maybe I ought to go with you. I could help take care of the old lady or something.”

  “I expect the neighbors will rally around. You stay here and finish the petunias. We’re late getting them in as it is. I’ll give you a ring as soon as I see how the land lies.”

  He gave her a quick kiss and ran down the hill toward Charlie Ross’s Garage, where they kept the car, since they had no driveway and to park around the Crescent was not the done thing. Helen stood looking after him, her fair-skinned face tender and her bluebell-colored eyes a little moist. Peter wasn’t a big man and he could have stood to lose a pound or two around the waist, but he could move like Paavo Nurmi in an emergency. How intelligent she’d been to marry him.

  And how remarkably sweet of him to have married her. There was a lot to be said for monogamy, she thought, getting back to her petunias. Peter had begun developing a new strain just because Helen had remarked how elegant it would be to have flowers along the front walk that were exactly the same rosy old-brick shade as the house. These were not yet a perfect match, but they were going to be lovely all the same.

  When Peter had got precisely the tone he was after, he intended to market the seed as Helen’s Fancy and rake in another pot, no doubt. Then perhaps they’d blow themselves to a trip. The Galapagos Islands would be fun, or Vermillion, South Dakota, or some other exotic and romantic spot. Unless Peter got himself embroiled in another mess such as wifely intuition told Helen he was heading toward at the moment.

  Now that Shandy had revealed an unexpected talent for detection, somebody was always after him to unravel an insoluble mystery that usually turned out to be nothing of the sort. But Timothy Ames was not one to panic over trivia, and Tim had been definitely panicking. Quicklime, ugh! “And all the while the burning lime eats flesh and bone away.” What blasphemy, on a day like this.

  Helen’s joy in planting the petunias that were to be named for her was gone. A cloud passed over the sun. She felt it only right and proper that the glorious light should be veiled.

  Some fifteen minutes later, over in Lumpkin Corners, her husband was thanking God he’d made Helen stay behind. This was no sight for a woman’s eyes, or a man’s either.

  Shandy didn’t see any way Spurge’s death could be due to an honest mistake. Henny Horsefall, despite his years, was as bright as he’d ever been and at least one of his eyes was in good working order. Henny hadn’t got around to throwing out the big, heavy paper bags from which he and Spurge had originally filled the spreader. They were stamped “ground limestone,” and Shandy and Tim had tested the residue, proving conclusively that the bags had contained only the harmless white powder they’d been supposed to hold. Traces of plain limestone were still caked on the bottom of the spreader. It was obvious the quicklime had been dumped in on top of the clogged openings, but why? How could one human being do this to another?

  “Maybe they didn’t mean to kill ’im,” Henny Horsefall replied to the question Shandy must have asked aloud. “Wouldn’t nobody ’cept a dern fool like Spurge stick their face down inside to see why ’twas bubblin’, would they?”

  “You might if you didn’t have your specs on,” said his aunt, who had refused to be shooed back to the house. “I would of myself, like as not.”

  “You wouldn’t of been hosin’ down the spreader, Aunt Hilda.”

  “Only because I’ve got one pair o’ hands instead o’ six. The way you let everything slide around here, maybe you let the lime go bad afore you got around to usin’ it.”

  “That wouldn’t happen, Miss Horsefall,” said Shandy. “Quicklime is an entirely different thing from what your nephew was using. The only way it could have got into the spreader, as far as I can see, is for it to have been put there between the time the spreader was last used and the time Spurge Lumpkin started washing it out. From the violence of the reaction, I’d say the lime hadn’t been exposed to the air very long. Can you remember what day you last used the spread
er, Mr. Horsefall?”

  “Thursday, I think it was. Four, five days ago anyway. I told Spurge to clean it time and again, but he forgot.”

  “Might o’ known he would,” sniffed the aunt. “Why didn’t you keep after ’im like you should of? If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a million times—”

  “Well, don’t tell me again,” her nephew snapped back. “I’m in no shape to listen. Neither’s Spurge, poor bastard.”

  “I s’pose we’ll have to lay out for the funeral.” Miss Hilda was determined to get the last word one way or another. “Not that we can afford it. Times is hard, in case you don’t know.”

  “You seen ’em a dern sight harder an’ so have I,” grunted Henny. “You go to bed with a full belly every night, don’t you?”

  “Nice way to talk in front o’ strangers an’ learned men, I must say. Couldn’t you at least o’ said ‘stomach’? Won’t nobody around here get nothin’ this night if I don’t bestir myself in the kitchen.” She grumbled herself off toward the house and nobody tried to prevent her leaving.

  “As to the funeral,” said Shandy, “I shouldn’t be surprised if the college could finance it out of the Agricultural Laborers’ Assistance Fund. Eh, Tim?”

  “Huh?”

  Professor Ames looked blank for a moment, as well he might, since his colleague had invented the Agricultural Laborers’ Assistance Fund as of that moment. Then he nodded. “Sure, Pete. Why the hell not? We’ll get Harry Goulson over here from Balaclava Junction. Let him handle the doings and send the bill to me. I’ll put the arm on Svenson.”

  “I ain’t takin’ no charity,” Horsefall protested.

  “What charity? Spurge would be as much entitled as any farmhand in Balaclava County, far as I know. It comes out of the endowment, doesn’t it, Pete?”

  It would come out of the pockets of Ames and Shandy, but neither was averse to stretching the facts a bit in a worthy cause and both had enough furrow mud on their own boots to realize what state the Horsefalls’ finances must be in. It was a miracle Henny had managed to keep the farm operating as long as he had. It would take another miracle, no doubt, to find a replacement for the dim-witted but willing Spurge. Lumpkin had most likely been working for his board and keep and a plug of chewing tobacco now and then; and chances were that was about all Henny and Miss Hilda could afford to pay.

  That problem would have to be faced when the more immediate one was taken care of. “Who around here has it in for you, Mr. Horsefall?” Shandy asked.

  The old farmer shrugged. “Don’t ask me who, but some bugger’s been pesterin’ the daylights out o’ me for the past three months. First it was kid stuff. Trash thrown around the dooryard an’ whatnot. Then it was limbs broke off the apple trees. I Suspicioned at first it might be that young hellion Billy Lewis, an’ threatened ’im with a pantload o’ rock salt from my old shotgun if he didn’t cut it out. He knowed I meant business, too, ’cause I done the same to his father thirty-two years ago.”

  Henny hitched up his suspenders and scratched his left armpit. “But Billy swore up, down, an’ sideways he never, an’ I believe ’im. The Lewises might be hellions buy they ain’t liars an’ never have been. Anyways then it begun to get mean. Chicken wire tore away an’ dogs let loose in the hen yard. Killed all our best layers. Then a while later it was ground glass in the pig swill. Lucky for me I seen it glistenin’ when I went to slop the hogs an’ managed to head ’em off with a sackful o’ grain till me an’ Spurge could get the feedin’ trough cleaned out. Last week I set out a hundred tomato plants I been nussin’ along since March an’ bejesus if I didn’t come out two days later an’ find every dern one of ’em dusted over with snuff.”

  “Great balls of fire!” exclaimed Shandy.

  “What’s so awful about that?” said Cronkite Swope. “I thought nicotine was supposed to be an insecticide or something.”

  “Tobacco is a member of the Solanum family,” Shandy explained, “the same as tomato plants, and it’s subject to a fungus that can be communicable. I don’t know whether dusting snuff over a planting of tender young tomato plants would spread a disease that could wipe out the entire crop, but it shows a damned nasty experimental bent on somebody’s part. And you’re quite sure it’s none of the Lewis family, Mr. Horsefall?”

  “They wouldn’t do nothin’ like that. No call to. Hell, we been neighbors for three, four generations now. Kids actin’ up is one thing. This is somethin’ else.”

  “It certainly is,” said the professor, thinking of what Spurge’s body had looked like by the time he got there. “You have no idea whatsoever who else might have done these things?”

  “Cripes, if I had do you think I’d be standin’ here jawin’ instead o’ loadin’ up the old over-an’-under an’ goin’ gunnin’ for the bugger? I sure as hell wouldn’t be usin’ no rock salt this time, neither.”

  “I understand how you feel, Mr. Horsefall.”

  “The hell you do. Spurge an’ me, we worked these fields—” The old man choked up.

  Tim took his friend by the arm. “Come on, Henny. You’d better go back to the house and have yourself a snort of Aunt Hilda’s headache medicine. The police will be along soon and they’ll want to talk with you.”

  “Talk? Too damn much talk already, an’ not enough action.”

  Nevertheless Hengist Horsefall allowed Professor Ames to lead him into the farmhouse. Young Cronkite Swope hung around looking hopeful.

  “You going to detect something, Professor Shandy?”

  “How in Sam Hill do I know? I detect you’re standing there with your tongue hanging out for a story that will get your by-line splashed all over the front pages of the Berkshire Eagle, if that’s any use to you. Who’s that coming? Not the doctor, surely?”

  A massive heap of blue denim and orange whiskers was waddling toward them from across the road, waving the sort of straw hat that used to be worn alike by man and beast in rural areas.

  “What’s goin’ on?” the slightly bogus-looking hayseed bellowed when he got more or less within earshot. “I ain’t seen so much commotion around here since the day Spurge got his shirttail caught in the cream separator. What’s he been up to now?”

  “Why should you assume he’s been up to anything?” Shandy asked.

  The newcomer spat into the dust and plunked his cow’s-breakfast hat back atop his ginger bush. “Just that he most gen’ally has. Spurge is the kack-handedest critter around a place I ever did see. Beats me how Kenny’s been able to stand him all these years.”

  “Mr. Horsefall acted real upset to me,” said Cronkite Swope.

  “You mean really upset,” Shandy snapped. “An adjective is modified by an adverb. If you don’t know what an adverb is, I suggest you look it up. Since you’re so obviously eager to rise in your chosen profession, young man, it behooves you to learn the rudiments of your craft.”

  Cronkite took the rebuke with good-humored disdain. “Oh, nobody bothers much about grammar and stuff these days. It’s all common usage.”

  “You are perhaps not familiar with Mark Twain’s observation that God must have hated the common man since He made him so common? In fact it is we who degrade ourselves by allowing our standards to be debased without a struggle.”

  The stranger emitted something that might have been a derisive hoot and Shandy turned on him. “As for you, sir, the rube getup would be more convincing if you didn’t happen to have today’s Wall Street Journal sticking out of your pocket. Would you care to enlighten us as to your identity?”

  “Not particularly.” The man spat again. “Man’s got a right to know what’s goin’ on in the world, ain’t he? Since you’re so free with information nobody wants, who the hell are you?”

  Cronkite might be weak on his adverbs, but he clearly held strong views on lèse majesté. “This is Professor Shandy from the college,” he informed the offender in a voice of icy rebuke. “And this is Fergy, Professor Shandy. He runs Fergy’s Bargain Barn down the road a piece�
�I mean a short way. You must have passed it on your way here.”

  Shandy did recall having averted his eyes in pain from what he’d at first taken to be a junkyard and then realized was some sort of open-air emporium. He’d been glad he hadn’t brought Helen along, since any place that advertised itself by means of a battered mannequin got up in a long skirt, bonnet, and shawl and had a lot of rusty hot-water boilers and bedsprings strewn about would have been sure to bring on that irresistible urge of hers to run in for a minute and see what they had.

  Fergy nodded, animosity forgotten in the presence of greatness. “Thass right. I seen you burnin’ up the road as if Smokey Bear was on your tail. Nice car you got. Wouldn’t want to jazz ’er up with a genuine 1937 Pierce-Arrow radiator ornament?”

  “No, I—er—think we’ll pass on the Pierce-Arrow. My wife has simple tastes.”

  Fergy eyed Shandy’s unassuming figure up and down. “Stands to reason,” he grunted. “Well, can’t blame a man for tryin’, as my old man said to the doctor when he got his first look at me. No doubt Spurge’s folks felt the same about him. Say, you said Henny was upset, Cronk. What happened to Spurge, anyhow?”

  “He got splashed with quicklime cleanin’ out the spreader. God knows how, but he got it smack in the face.”

  “Gorry! That could kill a man.”

  “It did.”

  “I want to know!”

  When a Yankee says, “I want to know,” he is not asking for information. He means, “I am expressing a suitable degree of amazement at the news you have already imparted.” Cronkite Swope knew that perfectly well, of course, but being a reporter, he continued to report, polishing up his journalese as he went along.

  “Little did Spurgeon Lumpkin reckon the morning of June 18—say, I wonder if Spurge was descended from that Canute Lumpkin Miss Horsefall used to—I mean the one she said used to be interested in the runestone?”

  “What runestone?” Shandy asked.

  “The one over behind that swale where the big oaks are. Miss Horsefall was just taking me to see if we could find it when we heard this God-awful screaming and—I guess you know the rest of it. Spurge must have been just about the last of the Lumpkins, mustn’t he? Any more of them left around here, Fergy?”