by Gil Brewer
I said nothing, remembering Van and seeing in my mind’s eye the bank on that Monday morning, the people milling in the streets, hearing the wild, despairing talk.
“The schoolteacher at the district school, Miss Blakesly—Helen Blakesly. She was a scared little gal, to begin with. She had a secret, something we’ll never find out. She came down and stood there, kind of with her mouth open. Then she came up to me and said, ‘Is this true? Is this really true? It can’t be true.’ So I told her it was true. Tuesday she didn’t show up at the school—kids never said anything, ‘course. Not till late afternoon, anyway—they were getting away with something. Got up a posse and found her in Cross Glen. You know where all that natural gas is, under the falls?”
“Yes.”
“Well, she had a box with the bottom knocked out. She was laid out on a slab of black slate, hanging over the water. She’d built up some rocks around a real bubble-hole of gas, put the box over that and stuck her head in the box. There was a hank of mossy place just back of her, and it had been used considerable—so there was a man in it somehow, but the secret’s still a secret. She was stiff’s a board when we found her.”
I no longer looked at him.
“She’d written on the slate with a stone pencil. Trouble was, nobody could read it—pure gibberish.”
I started to drink some more coffee, and suddenly did not want it.
“Naked, she was—lying there in Cross Glen.”
“But where did the money go?”
Kirk shrugged again. “Your father was out of town on Saturday, didn’t get back till late at night. Last person to see him was Bill Watts when Cy stopped off to get gas. Nobody saw him again till Monday morning. Nobody knows where he went Saturday. So far as the clerks knew, there was money in the vault Saturday morning when the bank closed at noon. Least, they claim so. Everybody says he spent it—took it somewhere—gambled it away. Or gave it to you.”
“What?”
“Hell, man! All kinds of talk. You should know that!”
“Who opened the vault when they found him?”
“Nobody. It was wide open and clean as willow bark.”
“Who found him?”
“Cashier, Lew Welch—and Cy’s secretary, Jeannie Hayes. They were the only ones that worked in the bank. They had a habit of taking coffee together in the morning down at the diner, then coming to the bank. Cy had a part-time clerk, but he moved away.”
They were all people I knew and remembered.
“Al, people think of him and they get to hating, even with him in his grave. They’re still crazy with it, and they’ll never get sane—not until—well, I don’t know. He got to own the whole of Pine Springs, almost. Sawmill, grainery, general store, the gas station, and he had the bank. He got considerable of private property, working loans and foreclosing. He’d fix loans payable in five years, say. Then he’d have them loving him with him holding the knife-edge to their throats and the blood coming even before the five years started. Low payments. They didn’t catch it. The payments were too low to amortize it in five years and then he wouldn’t extend. ‘Read the mortgage,’ he’d say. ‘I’m sorry, damn it! You certainly read it, didn’t you?’ He preached paving the roads, but the roads were never paved. Got control of the sawmill, took toll on their timber and cut. Look at the hills, Al. Some farms were wiped out with erosion, as if he’d run a big electric shaver smack up the forests.”
“Why didn’t they borrow money in Westfield, or Riverton?”
“They wouldn’t make loans there. Who wants to make out-of-town loans on poor farms?”
“People left?”
“Hell, no!” Kirk propped his elbows on his knees. “He’d tell them he’d let them live on their own land that wasn’t their own land any more. You know how he was, Al. ‘Why, Jones,’ he’d say, ‘I’m certainly not that much of a downright heel, for sure, now! I’d like for you to live right there where you always did live. Town wouldn’t be the same without you. I’m sorry how it looks—but damn it! You read the mortgage, didn’t you? Sure, now—you go right ahead and live just like always, Jones. We’ll work something out.’ And work something out, he did. Time they bought clothes and provisions and seed at his general store at his prices, with money they didn’t even have, but were supposed to be earning on a share and share, they didn’t have anything. Crop come in, they were worse off than when they started.”
It should have been hard to believe, that a man like my father had done these things, but it wasn’t, because I could remember him so easily. Pine Springs was not large, perhaps fifteen hundred people lived here, and my father had planned it well.
“Land baron,” Kirk said. “That’s what was the matter. He wanted baronial times with himself king of the hill. Well, he was king. He was a usurer of the worst type. He robbed them and cut their throats. High payments, low payments. Wrong appraisals. If they got some money somehow and came in to satisfy a mortgage he held, he’d talk ‘em into worthless or unsound stock investments and still hold the mortgage. Made nice contributions to the sheriff’s fund. Oh, and Prouty always got re-elected down the line. Prouty was always there to serve the papers at a foreclosure.”
The room became quiet. I could hear Sally clanking pans in the kitchen.
“When he did away with himself, they found everything in the bank’s name—everything but the house. They couldn’t touch that and that’s how come you got it, I guess. The depositors had a judge appoint a receiver over in Westfield. He came out, supposed to liquidate the bank’s assets.” Kirk laughed softly. “The poor guy nearly went nuts. Old Cy was qualified as an appraiser, see? So he appraised the land and farms, homes, for his own loans. This man came out and a place valued at fifteen, sixteen thousand was worth about seven or eight. Anyway, he tried to sell and couldn’t, naturally. He couldn’t interest outsiders because there wasn’t a bargain in the lot. It was a mess, Al. So finally he auctioned off the whole caboodle. Everything. Well, all the folks got together on a base bid. They bid low. He got mad as hell, but they crowded him. It was something, let me tell you. If he backed down, they would have hamstrung him. They got their farms back for practically nothing and the fellow went back to Westfield.”
I started to get up, then sat back again.
Kirk said, “Cy had plenty of juggling to do on those books. But the bank examiners had never questioned a thing. He was sick, Al.”
“A wonder the house is still standing,” I said.
“I figure it’s like a monument, something. Anyway, there it sits. Maybe they hoped you would come back.”
“What do you mean?”
“Al, they’ll crucify you! They’re scared of you and fear’s the worst thing can happen in a town of this size. Right now, I bet they’re holding meetings in somebody’s barn. Maybe they want you to pay up, Al. That’s the way they think. Son shoulders the old man’s burden, all that. They’ll sure as hell believe you’ve got that money—or had it. They’ll want to believe that.”
“So he must have spent the money and killed himself because of final conscience,” I said.
“They say every man’s got a conscience. Nobody ever accused Cy of having one.”
I stood up. Kirk rose.
“I’m staying at the house,” I said.
“Al, I haven’t told you the half of it. You’ll never be able to imagine how they felt when the bank failed. Why don’t you get while the getting’s good?”
“Because I’ve got to stay.”
Outside, the hound barked several times.
“Where’d you get that dog?” Kirk said.
“He was over at the house, that’s all I know. Why?”
“Well, maybe he’s somebody’s dog. They’ll say you stole him.”
He lounged along beside me, opened the door.
“What about you?” I said. “You hate him, too?”
“All my savings were in that bank, Al.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t. You need anything
, you holler. Right?”
I went on outside, stood by the car a moment, looking up at the hills. Bunk came rousting along and climbed in the side of the car through an open window. He was covered with burdock, burrs hung in clots to his ears.
It had been a long time since my father had worked this village to his own ways. It might have been yesterday. Kirk Hartmann was still excited about it, so what would other people be like?
Somehow I believed Hartmann was exaggerating.
I did not like thinking of what had happened to the people of this town. The whole business troubled me. My father had been dead long enough for me to remember some of the good things, or at least the things bad, but tempered. It would not add up correctly, not with my memories of him. He had been all Kirk called him, and more—much more than I knew about, apparently. But one thing he had never been—a secret spender. I had never known him to gamble—not according to rule. With other people’s money, yes—with surety of his own success.
That was not gambling. He was too much of a businessman to owe any gigantic sum, and less man enough to pay what he owed without somehow coming out on top. Where did the money go?
As I passed the sawmill, a man ran suddenly into the road. He staggered and lurched drunkenly, running directly at the car down the middle of the road, waving his arms.
I hit the brakes hard and Bunk began barking, short, strident yaps, his nose pressed to the windshield, paws up on the dash. The car slid in the wet-clay road, fishtailed as I tried to bring it to the shoulder. It caught in ruts, straightened out. The man kept waving his arms, shouting, and I managed to stop the coupé not three feet from him.
“Harper!”
He was a tall, broom-thin man, wearing a dark ragged suit, dirty white shirt and a knotted rag of tie. His hands looked skinny and cold, his dirty gray hair a thick mat on his head. He needed a shave, and across the car’s hood I could see the raw beeflike look to his eyes.
“Al Harper?”
I checked the rearview mirrow. No cars in sight. I got out and walked toward him.
He was very drunk, his clothes wet. He looked as if he’d slept out all night.
“Al Harper?” he said again.
“Yes?”
He stood by the front bumper of the car, cringing a little. He smelled strongly of the barnyard, and of fierce liquor.
“What do you want, man?”
He was grinning, saliva running from one corner of his mouth, his eyes slyly watchful.
“Herb Spash,” he said.
I still did not understand. Then something about him, some attitude, brought it back. Herb Spash, newly married just before I left town. He had been the town barber, and a good barber—taking up the trade from his father before him.
“Herb,” I said. “Yes.”
He suddenly began to weep, standing there. Tears sprang to his eyes, his nose ran. He coughed, lurched around and laid his head on his arms across the car’s grill. His shoulders hunched and rocked.
“What is it, Herb?”
He looked up, tears running down his whiskered, dirty cheeks. He began shaking his head.
There was agony in his face. He turned and began running off toward the sawmill buildings, hulked over there under broken-limbed elms and sparse hickory.
“Herb.” I started after him, then stopped.
Spash was running in a blind stagger. He tried to leap the ditch off the road and fell headlong. He crawled up the far side, got to his feet, ran into the lot where the mill buildings stood and vanished around the wet side of a huge sawdust pile.
All this time, Bunk had been barking. As I got beneath the wheel, he ceased and whimpered faintly.
Herb Spash had wanted something. He had not been able to bring himself to say what.
I suddenly wanted to get back to the house, clean it up, then sit and think. The sky was gray again, the sun was gone, the hills dark with cold shadows.
THREE
The hound had vanished.
I cleaned the kitchen and dining room, closed the glass doors between the dining room and the living room. I shoved the table and chairs out of the dining room, brought in a couch and an easy chair. The old kitchen wood cookstove would keep the room warm. Already it was much colder than yesterday. I avoided the rest of the house, but once I’d got the shelves stacked with food, everything else in order, I went into my father’s den, where I’d slept last night.
Dirt layered tables and chairs, bookcases, and the gigantic old secretary. This was what drew me. It had been his desk, forever stuffed and jammed to bursting with papers and ledgers that marked his personal history in Pine Springs.
I opened the desk below the glass doors.
The desk was empty. There was not a single shred of paper, not a letter, nothing. I went through all the drawers, including the two secret back panels I’d discovered as a child. There were four marbles, a line and fishhook still holding the dried carcass of a worm that had possibly been there fifteen years. In one of the drawers I found three Caruso records and recalled my father’s admiration for the Italian singer.
I covered the room. Nothing.
I decided to search the house, and spent two hours at it, from attic to cellar. There was nothing but books, kitchen utensils, and furniture. Not even an old newspaper stack in the cellar, not a paper bag, not a forgotten grocery list, and the attic looked incongruous. Everything neat, yet nothing to remember him by. Nothing to recall my mother, either.
I had avoided my old room. I needn’t have. It evoked nothing of the past—the bare bed, the old bureau, an empty closet and an old oil painting that my mother had done when I was ten of a Spanish galleon sailing heavy seas.
I brought my bags into the house from the car, opened the one with the whisky inside, and poured a water glass full. I drank it neat, chased it with well-water, got cigarettes and started walking through the cold afternoon toward the far hill.
I couldn’t get Herb Spash out of my mind. He hadn’t shown animosity; he had wanted to tell me something.
“Al.”
“Yes.”
We stood there in the doorway and looked at each other. I didn’t really see her—I saw memory. It was a very bright memory for the moment. I had walked to the ornate, wrought-iron door and worked the black knocker, disturbed slightly with the changes around the Gunther place. It was no longer just a hill farm, as I had remembered. There was something about it of idleness and rich discontent. Trimmed box hedges meandered about the grounds enclosing graveled drives. It was horsy, the paddocks in sight and far beyond, where corn and wheat and alfalfa used to grow, the fields lay fallow.
“There’s no one home but me, Al.”
“All right, I’ll come in then.”
I followed her through a vestibule that I did not recall, and into a hall. She swung the heavy mahogany and glass door shut, and immediately this was no longer a farm. It hadn’t been outside, either—that’s what had bothered me. Quiet jazz filtered through the house from somewhere.
“It’s good to see you,” she said. “I heard you were in town.”
I didn’t know what to say. It was like approaching somebody you knew very well you knew, then discovering after the first loud blunder that you’d never seen the person before in your life.
“I thought I’d better–”
“I’m glad you did, Al.”
She wore a soft dark skirt, a thin white blouse slashed deeply at the throat, the collar broad and flaring, and a tan Cashmere sweater. The sweater was open, yet it clung to her body. The hair was richer, darker, more luxurious, and heavy to her shoulders, curling on the soft weave of the sweater. Her face was pale, her lips dark and full, her eyes still darker than I remembered, and boldly staring. The smile was the same. And the body of this woman was full-blown now. She turned lazily and walked away from me.
“Let’s not stand in the hall, Al.”
I followed her, the trimly stockinged calves, the low white leather moccasins. It was a careless walk, her bod
y active. The back of the sweater rode across her fine hips as she moved slowly down three fieldstone steps that hadn’t been here before, into a sunken room of heavy drapes, thick carpeting and music.
She walked over to a large window looking out from the side of the house into the failing afternoon. There was a broad couch beneath the window, and slightly to one side.
“Would you like a drink, Al?”
“No, thanks.”
“Sit down.”
I sat on the couch, glanced up at her, then away. Somehow I couldn’t look at her without wanting to stare. She stood looking out the window. Light snow began to fall out there.
“Why did you come back?” she said.
I tried to tell her. It came out a jumbled mass. She had changed, yet she had not changed. “I didn’t expect you to be still living here, Lois.”
“I didn’t expect that, either. But I’m still here.”
She had not turned around. There was a wall between us, almost as if she could not turn around and face me.
I remembered the room, as it had been, not as it was. I remembered us, and what we’d had, and all the promises and the plans we’d made, banking on something we could not understand, only anticipate. She was not the same person I remembered, yet more of a person, and all the recollection of what she had been was in her—for me to see. As I sat there, she gave a little gasp.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” She turned quickly from the window and walked across the room to a cocktail table of gleaming black wood. “Won’t you have that drink?”
“All right.”
She smiled, poured whisky into two glasses, came across the room and handed one to me. We drank, looking into each other’s eyes. She held her glass familiarly and I suddenly realized that Lois was drunk. Something in her eyes gave it away, something in the way she drank from the glass, turned and set it down on an end table. She clasped her hands in front of her, tipped her head at me.