Surrender, New York

by Caleb Carr

  “Nice,” Steve said, momentarily pleased; then his face turned puzzled, as we straightened out on the lane. “But what will I have to hold over them?”

  “Something simple, as usual,” Mike answered, holding up a finger as he lit a cigarette. “That ‘bruise’ that Curtis says was caused by the killer’s foot stomping down on Shelby’s back, as a way of breaking her neck? Well, it’s not a bruise at all. It’s lividity. It’s the kind of easy mistake that rookies like Kolmback make all the time; and I almost feel sorry for him. But not for Weaver. Anyway, it shows that her blood settled in her lower back when she died—which it couldn’t have done in that closet. She had to have died somewhere else, and, given the violence of the break in her neck, probably someplace far away from that trailer.”

  “Jesus,” Steve murmured, smiling wider as the car moved forward. “Okay, boys—I owe you one!”

  “You just remember that,” I called back to him, “as this thing goes on!”

  And then we began rolling faster back down the lane. Far more important, however, a cacophony of sounds had become audible, heading our way from the southwest: sirens, and not just one variety, but several different types, the overall blare seeming, to my jaundiced ears, to reflect perfectly the competing interests of the officials from whose cars the loud, rapid whines were emanating. They were doubtless traveling in a column of vehicles, and one siren would have been more than adequate for their purpose; but ever since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan idiotically militarized Richard Nixon’s absurd “War on Drugs,” and especially in the era born on September 11, 2001, it has been the consistent habit of senior law enforcement officials to abjure subtlety in favor of a kind of martial intimidation; indeed, it was quite possible that the approaching column would roll up to the abandoned Capamagio trailer with a military-surplus armored vehicle of some kind, along with officers dressed in the black combat gear that had become so fashionable. All of which would have been merely comical, had it not also reflected a very serious reality: most such officials, in their zeal to treat every criminal event as a chance to display supreme control of social order, had forgotten that lawbreakers most often operate quietly and in the shadows, places where men wearing body armor and military helmets not only were out of place, but made the task of investigating the dark deeds that take place in those shadows all the more difficult. I therefore nodded to Pete, urging haste as he positioned the cruiser to take us back down to the highway below.

  The tale that Pete related on our return journey concerned not one but two prior cases of recent murders of teenage children in Burgoyne County; and it might be thought that both Mike and I would have had our imaginations as well as a new verbal interchange fired by this information; yet we, like the far wearier Pete, fell into a temporary disheartenment at the thought of so many young lives wasted, and a strange, silent pall fell over the inside of the car. It was a very uncomfortable silence; and it was not surprising that it was Pete who tried to break it, as we once more entered the village of Surrender and drove around its central point, a faded Civil War monument that was surrounded on all sides by taverns.

  “ ‘Surrender, New York,’ ” the deputy murmured, trying to get a small chuckle out. “They got that much right. Say, Doc, you know that story about old Colonel Jones”—he jerked a thumb at the statue, which was indeed a representation of my most famous forebear—“and the last time he came down to town? Are you ever gonna tell me what he was talking about, with that last thing he said?”

  “I can’t tell you what I don’t know, Pete,” I replied wearily; for it was a query and a conversation with which people had often tried to force me to grapple.

  “Come on,” Pete said, relieved by the distraction. “He was one of your own ancestors, for shit’s sake. You’re still trying to tell me that in all these years, you’ve never figured out what he meant?”

  I sighed, hoping that the deputy would just drop it. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. For the hundredth time…”

  “Miss Jones never told you?” he pressed.

  “Miss Jones does not know,” I answered. “Just as everyone else in my family, along with everyone in the town of Surrender, does not know.”

  “So all these years,” Pete declared, “alla them been kicking each other’s asses over something they don’t even understand?”

  “You find that unlikely,” I said, turning to him, “given your knowledge of the citizens of our town and county?”

  Pete hissed in discouragement. “I guess not. But I do wish I knew…”

  I looked back out the window as we entered Death’s Head Hollow, and its darkening countryside moved by us. “As do I, Deputy. As do I…”

  We were to pass the rest of our ride in renewed silence, silence of an even more downcast sort: How did this town and this county ever come to witness such things?, I think we were all asking ourselves, in our own ways; and such being the case, it seems an appropriate point in my tale to take a moment and explain what lay behind the deputy’s relentless curiosity, as well as the enigmatic and slightly sinister designations of both the road we were now ascending and the town we had just left behind.

  {v.}

  The name “Surrender, New York” has long been a source of amusement for passing voyagers making their way north from “the city,” or east from the state thruway to Vermont and other points in northeastern New England. The one-word directional sign on Route 7 that points the way to the town is in fact no more than that: an old rectangular piece of standard highway green sheet metal marking the turn onto a lonely byway and toward the northern Taconics beyond. But the message that the white letters on that sign spell out appears to suggest something else entirely: “SURRENDER,” they declare tersely, as if the small arrow next to the word reveals some secret path to a place where one might concede whatever struggles she or he has undertaken in life. Many are the uninitiated who have believed, who yet believe, that there must be some sinister or at least mysterious explanation for both the sign and the spot to which it points the way. But the few who actually make the side trip indicated are generally disappointed to come upon nothing more than a small, tumbledown hamlet at the crossroads of County Road 34 and another, unnumbered byway: a village with little to recommend it other than a seemingly common Civil War monument in the small square at its center.

  It would be difficult for me to say how many times, as a boy, I heard friends of my parents issue that same laughter at the small green sign, and then sigh in equally predictable disappointment when we reached Surrender and passed through it, during trips north from our home in New York City to visit my great-aunt’s farm above the village. Only when such guests found themselves driving through the unexpected beauty of Death’s Head Hollow would they resume their laughter at such a village’s being called “Surrender”—and “Surrender, New York,” at that, a phrase that has a different but equally amusing connotation. Had those visitors possessed either the time or the inclination to investigate the town, their dismissive amusement might have turned into something more meaningful: curiosity, for a start. Even a brief stop to view the standing blue and yellow plaque at the edge of the village proper, for example, would have told them that Surrender, New York, claims to be the place where the bulk of the British forces that took part in what the plaque dubs the “so-called Battle of Bennington” capitulated to Continental troops on August 16, 1777.

  The engagement played a key role in the soon-to-be-joined and decisive Battle of Saratoga: the Royalist soldiers near Bennington had been sent east to raid for badly needed supplies by their commander, General “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, who was invading south from Canada along the Hudson at the head of a considerable army. But the raiding party was first halted, then forced back westward, and finally caught and badly mauled by the Continentals, who killed nearly ten of Burgoyne’s men for every one of their own number who fell. The remaining Royalists tried to rejoin their commander’s main column to the west, and some succeeded; but many more we
re captured, although just where has always been the subject of much debate. Several villages near Surrender also claimed the honor, while the community from which the encounter would eventually take its name—Bennington, Vermont—had in fact played relatively little part in the affair, and indeed was not even in the correct colony to warrant title to the victory.

  Such, one might simply conclude, are the uncertainties of History: victory, runs the adage, has a thousand fathers, while defeat is an orphan. But in this case, defeat might better have been called a bastard, for the competing claims that were deleted from the larger myth of the Battle of Bennington nonetheless helped establish a pattern of often-ugly resentment and rivalry between towns like Surrender and Bennington itself. It was the bitterness engendered by these disagreements that led a group of well-to-do men in the more prosperous communities adjoining Surrender to decide, in 1791, that they had no wish to be incorporated into the new county of Rensselaer, which the government of the now-state of New York intended should cover the area from Albany to the Massachusetts and Vermont borders. Most of these disgruntled merchants were barely reconstructed Tories who had played no part in the disputed battle; but their considerable financial influence in Albany nonetheless secured agreement to their desire to create their own small county, angering their more ardently revolutionary neighbors, who were further enraged when the men perversely named their creation after the valiant if foolhardy British general whose defeat at Saratoga effectively doomed the British cause in America. And, as if all this were not enough, they next added insult to considerable injury by naming their creation’s seat after the most famous British casualty of that battle, General Simon Fraser.

  Was either name intended to be ironic? Or were the county’s founders really trying to enshrine two heroes of Tory America within the territory of one of the new republic’s most important states? The answer, never clear, grew even less so with time; all that was apparent was that differing factions and clans soon relocated so as to concentrate in the competing counties (or, in the case of Vermont, competing states), while their feuding just as quickly grew violent, sometimes ending in tavern or barroom stabbings, sometimes in unsolved deaths along lonely roads. Both Burgoyne and Rensselaer Counties were laced with dozens of mysterious hollows, those mountain concavities down which flowed angry little streams that sprang out of the stony crests of the Taconics. Along these waterways ran trails and crude roads leading to beautiful, shielded clearings, spots that, whatever their idyllic charms, were ideal places to dispose of embarrassing bodies, murdered and otherwise.

  And, like the town of Surrender at its base, the hollow known as Death’s Head would seem even today to also be hiding some criminal or even supernatural secret behind its name. Indeed, the suggestion is all the more pointed, in the hollow’s case, because its name is far older than that of the town, stretching back to the days when the latter was no more than a collection of a few shacks. What dark rites might those early settlers have been engaging in along the twisting, steep cart path that they cut up into the unusually lush forest of the hollow? The dirt of the path, always in danger of being reclaimed by the grass, ferns, and wildflowers around it, followed the course of one particularly noisy brook, whose rushing waters and small but endlessly chattering falls made it seem larger than it was, thereby increasing the hollow’s forbidding effect to the point that the suggestion of deadly—perhaps even ghostly—doings was inescapable even to the sunniest of personalities. (And along certain of the hollow’s stretches, such thoughts remain inescapable still.)

  But it is our lot to live in an age when names that we might suspect or even hope connote mystery and dark romance are usually revealed as disguising more banal origins and realities. The case of Surrender was one such example; and that of Death’s Head Hollow is another. The path that led, as the road that succeeded it yet leads, through stands of maple, pine, ash, and birch trees interrupted only by lushly carpeted glades (now pastureland) was, in fact, not one of those places where feuding men did each other violence; rather, it was simply a colonial dumping ground, a place where weary laborers from surrounding villages unceremoniously disposed of piles of animal heads, useless feet and limbs, and entrails, in addition to the pathetically struggling bodies of beasts too ill to be of further service to their harsh taskmasters. Obliging buzzards, bears, wolves, and wild dogs would rapidly be drawn in to the smell of such offerings, and would quickly dispose of them; and to indicate the dangers of both rotting flesh and wild scavengers, a crude wooden sign bearing the painted image of a skull above crossed bones was nailed to a tree at the hollow’s entrance. In this mundane way, the place’s name was born.

  In one sense, then, it was true that the hollow had seen much death, along with copious amounts of pain and sorrow, during the time that men had ventured into it. But the suffering and tragedies of animals were not then, as they are not now, the stuff of general human interest, much less human romance. Such sentiments would remain elusive in and around Death’s Head Hollow for many generations; but this did not keep those sinister auras that accompany any and all forms of human callousness and cruelty from settling over both the cart path and the land below it like a miasma.

  In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the fever bred by this noxious atmosphere spiked. Almost a decade after the Civil War, a canny Missouri merchant and former colonel in the Union army who went by the perplexing name of Caractacus Jones (the same ancestor of mine that Pete Steinbrecher had spoken of when we reached Surrender) moved to northern New York State, bringing with him a fortune made during a particularly successful career in lumber that had followed his military service. Colonel Jones bought up all the offal fields along Death’s Head Hollow from the ever-impoverished town of Surrender, for a sum small enough not only to make the town’s lack of appreciation for the land apparent to the newcomer, but also to breed in him a pointed contempt for the lack of industry and pride among his new neighbors. Hiring several dozen men from nearby towns—men willing to work long but fairly paid hours, unlike the denizens of Surrender—Jones proceeded to clear the bottomland around the stream in the hollow, to plow under the generations of accumulated animal bones and flesh (which only made the soil richer), and to establish there a fine farm, which he named after the battle he always considered the most harrowing of his military career. At the same time, he erected a profitable charcoal-fuel works on the wooded, rocky mountaintop, and in only a few years was taking in healthy profits from both enterprises.

  All this earned the Colonel (as his employees inevitably and invariably called him) the unending envy and hatred of the people of Surrender, who could not or would not interrupt their routines of thieving, poaching game, bartering, and drinking long enough to themselves attempt to enter Jones’ employ. But the final insult came when the Colonel took the only truly handsome woman in town, one Jenna Malloy, as his wife: the grumbling in the taverns of Surrender now began to evolve into vague and deadly plans, which had as their object nothing less than the death of Colonel Jones and the destruction of all he had built. The goal was as ambitious as the courage and cleverness of the townsmen were inadequate to its achievement; but malice forever trumps prudence, in the minds of such people, and their hateful scheming continued apace.

  The eventual fruit of all this outraged bloodlust was the dispatch into the hollow of two young men, relative newcomers to the town who were petty criminals and fugitives. The youths were liberally dosed with the deadly alcohol that was brewed in sheds behind some of the most pestilential houses in Surrender, and their assessment of their own abilities was further puffed up by the wickedly false praise of the men who had devised the scheme of which the pair were to be the instruments. In June, on the night of a particularly bright Strawberry Moon (as the Algonquin Indians had dubbed the occasion on which the Earth passes closest to its satellite), the two set out, carrying jars of the same ungodly substance that they had been consuming, along with canisters of black powder, several firearms, and an axe handl
e apiece. Their orders were to make their way to the charcoal storehouse, set it ablaze, and then, in the resulting confusion, dash to Jones’ large house and kill the Colonel, firing his home as they departed.

  It scarcely needs stating that all this was beyond the young men, whose fear steadily overcame their drunkenness the farther up the hollow they crept. Upon passing Jones’ house on their way to the charcoal works, they were set upon by the Colonel’s faithful dog Cassius, a mastiff who had survived the full four years of the Civil War at his master’s side. The brave yet aging animal could not, however, similarly withstand the trespassers’ panicked gunshots, along with numerous blows from their axe handles: he died with a series of mournful cries, and the commotion of this fatal confrontation roused the Colonel and the several men who staffed his house and its grounds. By the time these latter guardians, all bearing torches, found the body of the dog, the guilty assailants were on their way back down the hollow at a run, having left their jars and weapons behind; but when the Colonel joined his men, open, tearful grief overwhelmed him, the kind of grief that, in a true warrior, soon turns to rage. It quickly became clear that Cassius’ killers would likely never be able to run far or fast enough, and Jones dispatched one of his most reliable men to Surrender to tell the inhabitants that if the names of those responsible for the act were not revealed to him when he descended from the mountain, he could not and would not be responsible for his actions.

  It was then that the people of Surrender committed the act that would stigmatize them down to the present day. The townspeople were already drunk, and now became increasingly wild with terror—for not only was Colonel Jones coming, they quickly heard, but he was coming with every one of the men who worked the night shift of the ever-active charcoal works, and they were all armed with rifles, shotguns, and every sort of bladed weapon and tool. The men of Surrender tried to plan some sort of defense; but several of their women, only marginally less intoxicated than their spouses, pointed out that they had neither the means nor the nerve to put up an organized fight. It would be far better, they asserted, for the villagers themselves to punish the two young men before the Colonel came, and thereby appease him. The idea caught on quickly, for the pair of murderous interlopers had no families to protect them; and they were therefore brought forward as if they were suddenly strangers. But what punishment would be stern enough to anticipate and slake the volatile Colonel’s thirst for revenge?