Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797)

by Silvis, Randall;

  I got up finally and dragged back through the field and into the barn and looked at him. It is impossible to describe how I felt at that moment. But I now understand what compels a father or mother who witnesses their child’s death to immediately take his or her own life. The pain is just too great. It permeates every thought and feeling, it poisons and leadens every breath. I again contemplated picking up Jesse’s shotgun and propping it against my chin. My head felt ready to explode anyway, so why not?

  I don’t know why not. I don’t know why I did what I did. And I don’t excuse my reasoning, if such fragmented, convoluted thought can be called reasoning. But I convinced myself that I would be blamed for what had happened—blamed and punished for what was in fact an accident. I was an outsider in this place, I didn’t fit in, and nobody was likely to show an ounce of compassion for me. If this horror were discovered, I would be made to repeat over and over how I had forced Jesse into that stall. The police would dig copper pellets out of the dry wood. First I had frightened the little boy, then tortured him with the pellet gun, then finally I had shot him with his own gun. This would be the accepted truth, and I knew it with absolute certainty. There would be no more lemon sunshine on a meadow for me. No more covered bridges or Amish buggies. No more shows at Margo’s gallery or dinners in the city with June, no more browsing the book tables in Washington Square, no more mugs of tea or work at the easel in the dewy mornings. No more crows calling from the woods. This life I had made for myself, this life I had fought for, tooth and claw, would be over. Because of an accident. A stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid accident.

  Breaking into that dirt floor with its compacted layers of old manure and straw was like digging into concrete. I’m sure there were more efficient tools for the job upstairs in the barn, but those were Mike’s tools, so I went for my garden tools instead, tools I knew as old friends, tools that fit my hands. I managed to break through the hardened dirt with my garden weevil, a tool like a corkscrew on a long metal shaft. It works very well at twisting dandelion clumps out of soft sod, but the tines strained hard against the earthen floor of the stall. I used the long-handled spade for scraping and scooping dirt out of the widening hole. I worked breathlessly, frantically, as insentient as a beast.

  By the time I finished, every muscle and bone in my body was burning. My shoulders felt as if they had been beaten with a board. Two blisters had sprouted on my hands, and I had worked them bloody. The ground, after I lay Jesse and the two guns in it and covered everything with dirt, had a noticeable rise to it, so I carried the extra dirt out to my garden a shovelful at a time, flung it and scattered it, then worked it all into the topsoil. I hated myself every step of the way, loathed what I was doing. But I kept telling myself, You have to do this, Charlotte. You’ve no choice but to do this.

  Afterward I pried two boards off the stall wall, the ones with copper pellets embedded in them. These were all from my air pistol. Jesse had taken the shotgun blast full in his chest. There was no exit wound, maybe because of the heaviness of his hunting coat, or just the nature of shotgun pellets, I don’t know. There was almost no blood on the ground—anyway, none that I could discern in the adumbrated light.

  My actions, when I look back on them now, appear so calculating and cold. But they were not. I was capable of seizing on to only one thought at a time, of pulling a thought out of a black swirl of panic and acting upon it. Bury him—that’s as complex as my thinking was at the moment. My body was in overdrive but my mind was barely even conscious. Because all the while I ached with an ache of unfathomable regret, a scalding, red throb of shame and terror and recrimination.

  When the hole was covered and smoothed out and, to my eyes, the stall looked in no way odd, would call no attention to itself, I carried the boards outside to the fifty-gallon metal drum I burn my trash in. Then I went back inside the house and removed every stitch of clothing I had on and crammed it all into a plastic garbage bag. I put on an old house dress, and, using one of those sawdust bricks I use to start fires in the fireplace, I set the boards and my bagful of clothes ablaze in the trash barrel. I stood there for several minutes, alternately peering anxiously toward the road (nobody slowed down or showed any interest in me) and watching the fire eat up the evidence of my guilt.

  Afterward I went inside and scrubbed myself raw in the shower. I worked quickly, knowing I had to get through this before I let myself fall apart. I then put on jeans and a pullover shirt and took the old house dress outside and tossed it onto the embers too. Then I went inside again and sat by the window and watched the road and waited for it to come alive with police cars.

  72

  GATESMAN stood up then and, carrying the journal, made his way to his vehicle. He opened the door, reached inside for his flashlight. The long, thick-handled light felt especially heavy in his left hand, the journal in his right hand peculiarly light. What felt heaviest were his footsteps, his breath, the slope and drag of his shoulders. To keep himself from becoming short of breath, more exhausted by his thoughts than the much-less-demanding exertion of walking, he turned his mind elsewhere. On a morning like this, he thought, Deer Creek will be clear and fast. The trout will glitter in the sunlight. In his mind’s eye he could see a fat one moving in on the fly as he twitched it through the water, the trout’s rainbow scales glittering red and orange as it swam.

  He crossed close behind the barn then, came to the corner of the fenced-in pasture. He unlatched the gate and stood for a moment, considering the weeds. Even now there was a vague hint of a sinuous path. You thought it was made by some animal, he told himself, and shook his head, stood still for half a minute, then turned and continued on.

  In the barn he switched on his flashlight and aimed the powerful beam into the corner stall. In the center of the stall was the same stack of twelve bags of fertilizer he had glanced at a month earlier, four courses of three bags each, crosshatched atop one another, the top bag split open, its contents spilled onto the floor—everything exactly as he remembered it. But now he had to wonder why Charlotte failed to mention the bags in her journal entry. Not a single mention of them.

  He pictured the little boy crowded up against the wall, the too-large hunting jacket, the boy’s face split by shadow and light. It was then he noticed the missing boards. He moved into the corner of the stall, played the light over them. Yes, there, right along the edges. This wood hasn’t been exposed to the weather as long. Lighter in color. This is where she pulled off the boards. Why didn’t I see that before?

  Because you were looking for the boy, that’s all, he reminded himself. That’s all you were looking for then.

  Still... he thought, and regretted the oversight. Not that it would have changed anything, he told himself. But still...

  Next, he played his light around the bottom of the bags. Twelve bags at forty pounds each, he thought. Four hundred and eighty pounds. The thought took the last of his strength away, sucked him dry.

  He went back out to the pasture as quickly as he could, stood for a while leaning against the top rail. He could hear the intermittent squawks of crows squabbling in the trees. Normally they would be out scavenging at this time of day. Either rain was on its way or else they had found a meal out there in the woods. This realization made Gatesman think of an old riddle: If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?

  And he answered it, Yes. At the very least, other trees hear it. The animals hear it. The bugs and ants and snakes hear it. The woods, he knew, all woods and other secluded places, hear accidents daily, accidents no human eye ever sees, no human ear ever hears. Squirrels fall off branches and break their necks. Birds collide in midair and tumble to the ground. A running doe can step into a chipmunk hole, break a leg, then lie on the ground for days and days before it dies. And before long, all traces of that deer will be gone. The crows and vultures and other animals clean up the meat, then bacteria cleans up the hide and bones. The teeth are the last thing to go. Eventually they get scattered too, litt
le seeds that never sprout. In this way the forest cleans itself, as does the desert, the ocean, all the natural places.

  Nature does its job, he told himself. Now you do yours. When he thought he was ready to return to the journal, but still in no condition to return to the house, he sat against a fence post with his face to the sun. The light glared off the parchment and stung his eyes as he read.

  73

  WITH every passing minute I grew more apprehensive. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I was literally out of my mind with fear. I kept trying to think logically, but what an irrational mind sees as logical is just the opposite. All I knew was that the police would have to show up here sooner or later, and before they did, I had better cover my tracks.

  I got the push broom from the basement and took it out to the barn and swept the entire plank floor clean of any trace of my footsteps. But then the floor looked too clean, suspiciously clean. So I climbed up into the hayloft, yanked a couple handfuls of hay out of a bale, and sprinkled it down onto the floor, tossing it out in all directions. Then I had to get back out the front door without leaving any footprints in the new dust, so I literally tiptoed along the wall until I was outside again.

  Then I took the broom down to the stall and swept the stall, not neatly this time, but as messily as I could, just trying to cover up the shovel marks. But this time, a rise in the center of the floor was noticeable to me. I knew I had to do more.

  I chose the Walmart in Lewistown for two reasons. First, I had never shopped at that one, only the closer one in Carlisle. So I was less likely to be recognized there. Second, Walmart keeps their gardening supplies outside, so I had a smaller possibility there than at my favorite nursery of being noticed when I loaded up the Jeep.

  Along the way I passed a dead deer along the side of the road, and the sight of it gave me another idea. I felt sure that the police would use dogs when they conducted a search, probably the kind that can detect cadavers. But could the dog distinguish between species? I pulled over to the shoulder and thought about trying to load that deer into the Jeep but then realized that it didn’t make any sense. Why would a deer jump the pasture fence, go into a stall and lie down and die?

  So something smaller maybe. But what kind of animal? Of course I thought of the raccoons then, the ones who raided my garbage every month. So I got back on the road but kept my eyes open for the right piece of roadkill.

  I wasn’t even sure what the opossum was when I spotted it. It was white and mangled, and that long, ratlike tail, that ugly snout—just the sight of it made me sick to my stomach. But I was already thoroughly sick to my stomach with even worse, more indelible images in my head. So I pulled over just behind the flattened opossum, and when the road was clear in both directions, I jumped out. The only thing I had in the Jeep to pick the animal up with were the baby wipes I keep in the glove box, so, with one in each hand, I grabbed the thing by its tail and one paw and dumped it on the floor mat on the passenger side. I gagged the whole way to Walmart.

  There were three registers in the garden supply area. One was tended by a young man with a wispy beard, maybe midtwenties but no older. But he looked too bright-eyed and sharp, I could see his intelligence even from twenty feet away, where I was pretending to appraise the display of solar patio lights. Then there was a sullen, emaciated teenage girl who was more interested in her conversation with the adjacent cashier, a weary-looking woman old enough to be the girl’s grandmother, than in her customers, whom she rang up without even looking at them. Most of the time she kept stealing glances at the young man.

  I waited until her line was empty, then hurried to fill it. “I need ten bags of that fertilizer mix outside,” I told her. “No, make it a dozen. Twelve bags.”

  She reached for the laminated card with a lot of bar codes on it. “The Miracle-Gro?”

  “No, the Earthscape, I think it’s called.”

  “Twenty- or forty-pound bags?”

  “Forty.”

  She ran the bar code over the scanner but still didn’t lift her eyes to me. “Twelve, you said?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  I paid with cash. The only time she met my eyes was when she handed me the receipt. “I’ll ring for somebody to load them for you. You have a truck, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “But I don’t need any help, thanks.”

  Her gaze had already wandered back to the young man. “Just show the receipt if anybody asks.”

  Nobody asked. I heaved all twelve bags into the back of my Jeep, then slammed down the tailgate. And that’s when it hit me. The clarity. The full, sudden acknowledgment of what I was doing and why I was doing it. I swear to God, it hit me like a searing, blinding blast of heat. As if the sun had exploded right before my eyes. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see anything but a throbbing brightness. I stood there gasping and half collapsed against the tailgate. The brightness was inside my head as well as outside and all around me, and I thought to myself that maybe this is what a stroke feels like, maybe this is what Daddy feels every time he has one of those little explosions in his brain. And I hoped that I was having a stroke. I hoped that it would kill me right then and there. Because I understood with a sudden damning clarity that now my life was forever changed. That nothing I could do could ever change what I had done.

  Eventually I climbed back into the Jeep and drove home. That dead opossum on the floor stank to high heaven. The stink stuck in my nose and throat, so I kept the window down in case I vomited. The only way I could hold down the nausea was to stare at that mangled little body with all the hatred I could summon and think, That’s you there, Charlotte. That’s you from this day on.

  74

  OKAY, I’m back. Sometimes I have to take a break from this, have to go crawl into a corner and sob my eyes out. But I’m trying to get this written as quickly as possible. I need to.

  So back to that day, that endless, excruciating day. I pulled the Jeep down around to the pasture but not into the pasture. I knew that I would leave tracks if I went off the lane that Mike’s tractor and wagon had worn through the grass. So I had to haul those bags one at a time into the stall. But first I laid down the opossum. Then stacked the bags on top. But then it all looked too neat and new. So I ripped open the top bag and spilled some of the fertilizer around.

  What more can you do? I kept asking myself. What more can you do? Nobody who has never experienced this kind of senseless panic can understand what it is like. I felt like I was overdosing on speed, like my head and my heart and my lungs were literally going to explode at any second. I wanted to scream and scream and scream and scream. I still want to. I guess, though, that what I’m doing now is a kind of scream. I do feel a lessening of pressure the more I write. But I am not doing this for me. In fact, this is the first time all month, and probably well before that, that I am doing something not for myself.

  So I burned the floor mat and sprayed air freshener through the Jeep. Went back inside and waited for the shit storm to hit.

  In the afternoon I heard the rumbling of Mike Verner’s old red Farmall. I hadn’t looked outside in a couple of hours by then, so I was surprised to see that the sky had darkened off to the west and that a massive dark cloud was slowly moving in. Then I just stood by the window in my numbed state of shock and watched Dylan spreading lime over the cornfield. I wondered if he had gotten that tattoo yet, and, if so, if he had tried yet to scratch it off.

  After a while, and I really have no idea how long, Dylan brought the tractor to a halt. He wasn’t far from where Jesse and I had exited the woods that morning, so when Dylan hopped down off his seat, my heart seized. I felt another panic attack coming on. I kept thinking, Get back on your tractor, get back on your tractor.

  But Dylan reached in behind the tractor’s seat and pulled something out. At first I couldn’t see what it was, but then I saw that it was white. A roll of toilet paper. He glanced back toward the house, just a quick look over his shoulder. I ducked away from the
window for a few seconds, and when I peeked out again, he was nowhere to be seen.

  I sat breathless at the corner of the window, and Jesus, how my chest ached. I can feel it again right now, that crushing, airless fear. I felt like I was holding my breath the whole time he was in the woods. But it wasn’t long before he came trotting back out, shoved the toilet paper behind the seat again, climbed up, yanked at a couple of levers, and the tractor rolled forward once more.

  The surge of relief that hit me when he went back to spreading lime, how strange that seems to me now. But no stranger than the fact that a minute or two later, the relief turned into uncontrollable, convulsive sobbing again. I just wanted to give up, that’s how I remember it. I just wanted to pass out and never wake up.

  I slid down to the floor, curled up into a tight little ball. My body felt so sore and beaten, and I kept sobbing because I didn’t know how to quit, didn’t know how to sob myself back to something better. Eventually I must have sobbed myself to sleep.

  When I woke up, Dylan and the tractor were gone and the massive cloud was so close that I could see the charcoal squall lines reaching down to the ground. Plus the wind had picked up and there was a chill in the air. Most chilling of all, though, was the fear that maybe Dylan had noticed something out there in the woods, something that meant nothing to him at the time, but later when the police questioned everybody would take on new meaning. Had either Jesse or I left something out there? Had I dropped anything? Had Jesse? At that moment, in the state I was in, everything was significant, everything was incriminating. So I hurried back outside, coatless this time, and into the woods.

  The only thing I could find was the little pile Dylan had left behind and the dirty wad of toilet paper. Did it matter? I wondered. Think, Charlotte, think! Should it be there or not?