by Jeffrey Lent
“I see you talk a fine streak. But you are aiming at the wrong target. Which you must know if you’ve talked with Mr. Hopeton.”
“You’re speaking of Amos Wheeler.”
“I am. And, begging your pardon, but you should be too. Not Bethany Hopeton.”
“Ah, boy, I know you were there those past four years and saw and heard the Lord knows all manner of things. How well you understood what you were seeing is not to be debated. But Amos Wheeler—why, if the whole wide world does not know what scoundrels he and his family were, then certainly the whole county does. First-hand, many people. No—there is no surprise in Amos Wheeler. Do you comprehend that?”
“Missus Hopeton was terrified of him. For good reason. That’s what I know.”
“Which explains why she went gallivanting about the state with him? Why she helped strip bare the fortune of Mr. Hopeton’s farm once he was off with his life in jeopardy every day in this terrible bloody conflict? Why she donned finery and flaunted it about the town? There are a great many who can and have spoken of her as being full of life those years. And you’d have me believe this was all Wheeler’s doing? Has it occurred to you she was merely making a show before you to conceal her true nature?”
Stone had released his grip upon Harlan and the boy used the moment to move down the bench, turning as he did to not only face Stone but make it harder for the man to grab him again. Harlan’s face was hot with anger and also the blush of fear and self-hatred, but he drew a breath and spoke.
“All what you’re saying makes sense and it’s all wrong. You did not see what I did and you don’t want to hear it. It strikes me as mighty strange neither you or the judge want to hear me. All what I have to say takes the blame from where you’re trying to lay it and set it where it squarely and truly belongs.”
Stone studied him a moment, a dark clutch of anger passed over his face, then it cleared and he crossed a leg over a knee and leaned back. “Tell me, then, Harlan Davis.”
And Harlan was struck dumb a moment, the memory swarm of Amos upon him in a jumbled cascade but the urgency of the opportunity also swelled and he would not lose this chance and so tumbled words.
“It’s so much, so much over those years—you understand that? It’s a pile of a mess and hard to sort. But throughout I never doubted it was Amos because once word come Mr. Hopeton had been wounded, everything changed and it was all Amos after that. Before it was mostly life as it had been but without Mr. Hopeton: We worked the farm and things was normal enough even though I could tell Amos didn’t like my being there, but he hadn’t any argument against me. I was sleeping in the old bedroom that had long ago been Mr. Hopeton’s grandfather’s room—where Mr. Hopeton put me when he hired me—and that room hadn’t been changed so much all those years, but it suited me. What I’m trying to say is things much of that first year ran the way they should’ve and although I knew Amos didn’t care for me, Missus Hopeton was kind and saw I was well fed and kept up the house as if her husband would walk back in any moment. Which was what we all thought that first year. When word come Mister Hopeton had been wounded, we thought he’d be home soon and so kept right at it. But it wasn’t so long after that when things changed. She got a letter from him; it was me brought it back when I drove the butter and cream cans in one morning. There came a strange time after that when Amos wasn’t around at all, off in his cabin in the woods, we both, Missus Hopeton and me, both knew that’s where he was but we didn’t speak of it. I just held to my chores and she helped best she could: She was more handy than most might think. Then Amos came back.
“It was a late February day and I recall it well since he walked in and slammed the door while she and me were sitting to dinner and he sent me to the barns and I asked him what for. Since there wasn’t nothing needed doing just then but to hitch the sledge and go to the woodlot, which I couldn’t do alone; and he pulled me up by the hair and told me things had changed and I best pay attention and then booted me toward the door. Well sir, I went fast enough but was angry over it all and set in the barn tinkering with this and that, passing time until it was time to milk, which I done and then finished up and walked back up to the house in the dark, the windows lit up in the kitchen and walked in and seen em. Missus Hopeton setting by the stove all pinched down and Wheeler leaning over her with one hand laid up against her cheek, his face down almost against hers, and when I walked in he reared up and I seen how her cheek was red and also wet. Then she stood and left the room and Wheeler stood looking at me and then he left too. Followed her and I stood there listening to her steps and then his going up the stairs and a door slamming shut and a moment after that the sound of a boot crashing against a door. I set down my milk and went back to the barn and slept in the hay that night, which was the first time but not the last.
“It went on from there. I can’t tell you all. One time I walked in and seen him holding her with both hands one around her neck and the other twisted in her hair and she was lifted right up against the wall, her feet kicking and he was spewing vile words at her. But when he heard me he turned and dropped her and she ran off upstairs coughing and he came to me and folded his arms over his chest and asked me was I ready to get the hay in. Other times, most other times it wasn’t so harsh unless you was there—you know what I’m saying—it could look like one thing but I known it was another, her voice pitched up a bit high even as she was nodding and even chiming in as Amos told me what to do while they were going off to talk to a man about the wheat . . . but even the way he said that I knew he weren’t about any such thing but something else. Or when he’d have his family members come to help with something, getting in the corn or making hay or even just slaughtering the fall beeves how he’d send me off on some other job that often as not did not make sense for the time, but I couldn’t tell him so: He had it timed so it was all just close enough. You know what I mean? How a fellow can do that?
“It’s what I’m trying to tell you. I seen her one time with a eye bruised the color of rotted meat. She told me she’d walked into a door the middle of the night. Maybe she did. Another time they’d been gone a few days and come back and she was all alone and so after I did my best to get everything right I walked out to the woods where Wheeler had a cabin made years ago and I called out just to see if he was there and he come out of there in his trousers and beat me so bad I couldn’t breathe a couple of weeks without my side hurting and he never said a word the whole time. Or any word at all the day later when he come back to the farm and settled in, except the time he asked if I’d got the butter down to Dresden and laughed at me when I was only able to nod since it hurt too much to talk. And Amos Wheeler grinning at me. He knew I knew. You understand that? He knew.”
Enoch Stone waited, let his silence dribble out until it hung between them. Waited until Harlan felt the pause flow over himself and doubted not what he’d said but how he’d said it, doubted his words made any sense to anyone save himself.
Finally Stone uncrossed his legs and leaned forward and quietly, almost kindly, said, “It distresses me of course to hear how Amos Wheeler would brutalize a woman. Even in such a situation as the both of them clearly were in. But, Harlan, lad, you must consider two things: the first being why Malcolm Hopeton would’ve hired such a man in the first place. And the second, the most difficult one, is irregardless of Wheeler’s behavior, of what you saw of it, there exists a history of Bethany Hopeton prior to her marriage that most strongly suggests she, also, was not the person Malcolm believed her to be. And while it’s a terrible thing for a hired man to abuse his master in the countless ways Wheeler undoubtedly did, it’s by far a greater transgression for a wife to befoul her husband in the varied and wide array that Bethany undertook. As your account not only suggests but corroborates what is known of her character. By those who know better than any others. It does pain me to tell you of these things: You’re a trusting, loyal young man and I’d not want that larger trust in humanity to be ruined by these experiences of yours t
hese past years. But you must understand, Harlan, whatever Wheeler’s wrongs, and they were many and fully evil—though his history suggests he had no education of the meaning of evil beyond petty and momentary gain—Bethany Hopeton was raised in the grace of the Lord and so turned away from that with a comprehension fully otherwise than Wheeler’s limited and rank notions of life. And so she stood above him, all ways. But she did not rise but yielded. Not only willingly but willfully. As she had all of her life and as her father will attest. For no man can know a woman better.”
Harlan said, “Mr. Hopeton has said otherwise and my own eyes told me he was right even before he was back to say it to me. I think you chase words around like horses on a track, wanting to see your horse win. But you ain’t following the right horse. I keep trying to tell you that.”
Stone said, “You insult me from your own passion and I forgive you that.”
Harlan said, “I don’t want your forgiveness. I want you to see the truth.”
“I see it most clearly. I saw it two weeks ago when I first came and talked to you and asked you questions. And I asked a certain question and you fled. So I ask again: Did Bethany Hopeton not come to you? Naked in the night? Rose-pink from her bath? Did she not prevail upon you, Harlan Davis? You’ve already answered that question by fleeing once. How will you answer it again?”
Harlan sat stunned a moment and then was rising from the bench and turned upon Stone, for those short moments towering over the man, his face a red heat, the same heat poisoning his body to where he felt he was ripping and jumping as he said, “You don’t know a thing, you don’t understand at all. Not a bit of it.”
Stone smiled and said, “I don’t? Do tell. And will you tell the same to the judge?”
But Harlan was off and running.
Stone called after him. “I’ll find you as I need to.”
He didn’t look back until he’d run a block from the courthouse, then glanced around as he was coming upon the merchant blocks, saw nothing of Stone but did catch the curious glances of passersby and so cut down an alley and slowed to a walk, near an amble, with his hands in his pockets, his chest thumping with a wild heart and his mind awhirl. Of course, he thought, he ain’t chasing after me, he’s gone upstairs to report all I said to the judge. Or maybe not even that, maybe he’s just riding on home and will ponder what I said and what course of action he should take. He knows where to find me.
It was those last words kept rolling around his mind as he exited the alley and crossed before the opera house, again among the afternoon throng. He stopped to watch three heavy wagons loaded with shocked wheat making their way down to the mills—either farmers without their own threshing machines or those simply using the expedient of selling direct to the Burkett brothers, pennies less the bushel but less work on the farm. Market wheat. He stood then, smelling within the effluvia of town the bright sharp smack of fresh-cut grain, the smell mostly rising from the wheat straws all redolent of what he should be doing. Cutting oats. And it was then it came to him that he could not go back to August Swartout’s. He had no notion of how he might help Malcolm Hopeton now, following all he’d been told this afternoon. But did know if any such a thing was possible he needed to be hidden and alone, to ponder, consider and, for the moment as important, not be found by anyone intent upon his not undertaking further action on that course.
His destination became clear. The only place he might go. He had a terrible thirst and recalled the trough built of soapstone slabs that stood before Burketts’ to refresh the teams and so went along his way, catching up to the last of the loaded wagons rolling down to the cavernous doors where the teams entered and the loads were swept clear. He paused and worked the pump handle and then knelt as the water sluiced forth and turned his head to gulp down water. When he stood the front of his shirt was wet but he felt clear and of purpose and so walked through the town. His day, this day, once again seemed a new one, freshly started.
He was used to open horizons of stretching fields and folds of the land and wide skies but even here in the cluttered closeness of several-storied buildings he felt the freshened air, a breeze coming off the lake and his eye went up to spot the few high scudding clouds. And thought It ain’t going to rain, it’s only a spat of cooler air rolling down from the north, keep things fresh and dry for days to come, good to make oats. But he turned east not west and felt lighter with the clarified air and his own mind, striding along, the boardwalks less crowded, his feet purposeful and rolling easily toward the street that turned gently uphill as it became the Milo road. The thought came that the judge might’ve had him followed—a foolish idea, the judge could not care one whit if Harlan hurried around the courthouse to seek out the basement cell or merely hightailed it back to Swartout’s and his work. He could see up the leafy avenue that led toward the table of land stretching out into Milo, toward Hopeton’s farm. Dogs lay in the shade, the houses quiet, a few children playing listless late afternoon games, overdressed town ladies taking the air on their porches. The slow flutter of fans. The day gone gold, greens bright in the light or darker in the shade. Wedges and bars of shade; golden light crosswise upon the yards and houses.
And he paused then and let his mind drift off a bit, as if overhead, riding the thermals of a hawk, or better, the air as a crow flies. And saw then his route, not along the road, but among the fields and farm lanes, the wooded ravines and gulleys that stitched together the land as a rumpled quilt, and continued walking until he came to the next to the last home on the rise of land, where as he passed he glanced about and seeing no one, turned as he came upon the carriage barn of that home and slipped quickly down the shadowed north side of the barn and beyond, past the vegetable garden and then was among trees and dense shade, moving downhill quickly over rough ground, into the ravine where a stream cut down toward the eastern head of the Crooked Lake, a ravine he’d cross and then work uphill and onward crosslots toward Malcolm Hopeton’s farm, his own home these last years.
He came out of the woods and onto the road that opened up both sides to the rich broad land of Milo, the skies wide and high as if falling off the earth and both sides now he saw men at work in their fields, the clap of reaper paddles and the cries of hawks overhead. He turned forward again and found he was barely a mile from the farm, his feet tossing up a flimsy trail of dust. Where the land fell away to the west he saw the rise of the Fultons’ barn and doglegged down a farm lane, now walking full into the afternoon sun but hidden between a corn field and a grown-over pasture thick with wild blackberries and burdock, thinking Benny Fulton lacks the backbone to make that lazy Calvin get out here and dig up the thistles. He turned when he came to the overflow ditch from Fulton’s farm pond and followed it up and then cut around the pond, behind Fulton’s barn, all the while unseen and certain of it, not sure what his detour had gained him but for the sense of stealth coming in.
He crossed the road again not a quarter mile from where he’d left it and paused, peering down the road; but it was broad and empty, fading into dust mirages of the distance. He crossed and was once again on the land he’d tended and left not a month before, entering into a hay field that was thick with high hay gone to seed and new undergrowth pushing up between the tough stalks and felt the quiver of anger over a job not done. He gazed across at the corn he and Hopeton had got into the ground, the young leaves paled with coffee-colored dust, the rows between grown up with dock and lamb’s quarter, loosestrife and—brought a grim smile—young burdock. As he came up the field behind the house and barn he slowed and lowered himself to the ground and crawled along the row, the sharp rasping corn leaves scraping his face and bare arms, and he kept his head down, smelling the soil. Then he was a dozen feet from the end of the row and so sank down flat and waited and listened. He heard nothing but for a single crow over the field who’d spotted him and sawed back and forth harking alarm and bringing Harlan to a fury of rage until he recalled he’d seen crows do all sorts of such things and never paid a mind to it,
even on any of his worst days. So he hugged against the hot earth and waited as the sun dropped more and lit the rows at a low soft angle and only then wormed forward until he could look out upon the buildings, his head lifted on his elbows yet still a yard or so back in the corn.
He knew at once the place was empty and was struck by how shabby the house appeared, as if it hadn’t been painted in years, and realized it might’ve been bright all those years before when Malcolm Hopeton first brought him there but nothing had been touched in the time since. The barn reared high and strong but it was the smaller things he noted, the weeds growing up on the rear bank-entry to the barn’s haylofts, the thicket of high grass about the back entry of the house, all of which had always been scythed down at least twice a summer; also the window lights of the house, dull and smeared and empty of life within, the blank squares where a pane had broken or been knocked out by a stone—Harlan thinking of Calvin Fulton and guessing he’d slipped up a time or two at dusk to fling a rock, half-hoping some form of Bloody Hopeton would issue from the house and terrified such might occur. Racing homeward in the thinning light or pale wash of moonrise without looking behind for the thrill of what he might see pursuing him down the road.
An hour later while there was still light enough to see he was inside the horse barn, the mule pens with their mounds of old manure like so many apples heaped in a fallen pyramid, sprouting pale white slender mushrooms already tipping over to show their dark gills, the ink-blot stains along the stems. Fresh and old cobwebs strewn between every post and rafter, some few flies droning their death songs where they were caught, the big summer spiders hunched in corners waiting, in no hurry to race and wrap the flies. Above the pens toward the north end of the barn the big trapdoor was open into the loft, where stale dribbles of flung-down hay were likewise caught in the webs, old hay, old webs. And he thought I can’t stay here.