“Janie…” he said, and found that he had nothing to say. She was honest, and would be honest. She had declared her connection to him, yet now imperiled it out of honesty. Testing? Testing? No. In spite of anything she might find out about him, she was his, and she needed him. So many things to find out! How brave, how responsible he thought he had been until, sitting in the wicker chair in the waiting room, he remembered that his only brother lay empty and waiting in another room! It was then that he became afraid of the police, afraid of his poor mother and father, afraid of the fire, afraid of Jane, afraid to move for fear of breaking his suddenly brittle, fragile bones. Germs from the sinks of the hospital crawled toward him with their object his blind death. The cigarette he smoked was giving him cancer at that very moment. He closed his eyes and saw fluttery yellow lights, the aura of a brain tumor. He could taste the bitter copper of his own last choke. When Jane came, finally, from Junior’s bedside, he had nearly recovered, and although he had sweat and was still shivering slightly, he was fairly sure she hadn’t found him out.
“Janie,” he said again. Tired, showing her age in the brighter light, she watched the black road and wouldn’t answer him. For a moment he was extremely angry, perhaps because he, too, was overtired. Then, as suddenly, he was calm again. Did he really want, as Bruce had, according to his diary, someone he deserved? Someone he had to earn? Or was that too much for a coward to cope with, and he’d better go back to a French girl with her built-in respect for a hard-on? Or Minetta Randolf, who wasn’t so very different, in most ways. She just happened to have her way of taking the measure of a man. Literally. Or the little mimeograph girls of his college-radical days, who did everything they could for the cause and the causers of the cause. The hell with it.
Bruce wanted to ride a white horse into danger, to shoot his way to happiness while the bodies of villains fell lightly into dust; even to receive wounds in that magical spot on the shoulder. Who wouldn’t? What simple problems at sundown on the desert street where total honor hung in the balance of a gun! And what lovely finality as the villain (fear) died and was hauled off to Boot Hill (nostalgia). The memory of some fears could be beautiful—the fears that you were not afraid to remember. The fear the Riders deliberately courted (a cylinder is a kind of gun; a piston is a kind of bullet) was such a fear, and he could not blame them for seeking. The gnawing of installment payments, the march of days till rent-is-due, the mysterious stealth of interest, the infinite boredom of manual work—these were the hard ones to remember. Much better to flirt with simple death on a windy road at night.
The black road turned in the headlights now dimming in the light of a clear day, and Jane said, “You missed the turn.”
As he watched for a place to turn around he said, “Janie, I used to think if I didn’t hurt anyone I was being a good man.”
“Then be dead,” she said, “and leave nothing.”
He turned in a woods road and then, coming back, watched carefully for the farm road. Leave no issue and no issues. Only the dead stayed neatly in the indices of stones where you could always look them up. They never batted an eyelash at anybody.
“What I meant to say was, I know a lot about the sins of omission.”
She would not answer. But he did know much about the sins of omission; the sins of emission without emotion. He’d been practicing them for a long time. Sadly he thought: John Cotter, perhaps you were meant to be thus, a man of cheap and sudden gestures, meant to do and run away. What talents you have been given! You can kill. You can hurt. You can please. You can work upon others the sickness of needful love.
“Janie, I love you.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
As they turned up the long gravel road to the farm he glanced at her and found that she had slumped down in the seat. She watched the tops of the hemlocks move by in the smoke they had now entered. Her hands were open, palms up, on her lap.
Mrs. Pettibone had breakfast ready. Adolf and Aubrey, who had just come back from the firelines, ate their pancakes slowly but surely, their hands and faces black except for startling white lines across their foreheads where their caps had been. Soot and exhaustion made them look almost alike. Sam Stevens had slept some, yet he seemed more tired than anyone. He was not talking. Jane didn’t mention Junior’s hurt eye to Mrs. Pettibone: there was the possibility that it would be all right. She would not look at John, and wanted no breakfast. He saw her last at the stairs, where she thought she couldn’t be seen. He was at the kitchen sink washing his face and hands and could just see her through the front hallway. She raised one foot to the first step, then turned and put her face to the wall, arms at her sides, and leaned her forehead against the wallpaper.
She must truly love her brother, he thought. She must believe that he is innocent, and that even so he is doomed. He watched her as she turned again to the stairs, trim and lovely in her dungarees and man’s shirt. She climbed slowly out of sight. What lesson in love could she give him? Could she love that hulking bully for the accident of brotherhood, for his imperfections, for his love for her; for all of these things?
He poured maple syrup, and the wedges of white butter floated slowly across his pancake. Mrs. Pettibone came up behind his chair and put her hands on his shoulders. “She’s just awful tired, John,” Mrs. Pettibone whispered, her teeth clicking, her warm breath conspiratorial in his ear. “Don’t you pay it too much attention.”
Sam spoke, his voice harsh: “Raddio says we may git wind. No rain, as per usual. Wind.”
Forks clinked upon china. Adolf grinned whitely and shook his black head. Aubrey ate on.
“Too damn’ much to git one thing at a time. Fire, and now Junior,” Sam said. “What next?”
“But I thought they was doing better,” Mrs. Pettibone quavered. “They moved the headquarters and all….”
“They’ll most likely have to bring it back,” Sam said.
“I prayed—”
“Prayed! ‘Sprayed’ be more of a help. Next time maybe they won’t even stop here—set her up in Leah square, by God!” The old man set his chin and stood up. “I ain’t asking for nothing. I see Cascom Mountain burn like a pine knot once. Hull goddam mountain. That was in the fall of 1885. I reckon Aubrey see that one pretty close, too. Lost his father’s house and barn. It ain’t the first time, nor the last.” He stepped heavily into his overshoes and went outside.
John followed him. There was no sign of wind yet. The valley of Cascom Lake was full of brown smoke, but the lake and the unnaturally wide strip of dried shoreline were visible. The burned hills were dark beneath the brown smoke: A wind would pull off the layer of carbon and reveal acres of bright coals.
“They could be wrong about the wind,” John said.
“Better be,” Sam said. “They just damn’ well better be, John. I ain’t got the poop I used to, for one.” Then he looked down at John, shrewd wrinkles radiating from his pale blue eyes; a hint of amusement in those black birds’ feet. “Jane, she went to bed,” he said, and went off to the barn.
On the way home Bob Paquette came up behind John on his motorcycle and flagged him down. Bob left his motorcycle idling and got into the car.
“Christ, John!” he said. “What the hell happened with Atmon and Beaupre?” His wide red face was round; his hair seemed to bristle with his admiring curiosity. Evidently the time of his disapproval had passed. John told him about the fight and Junior’s wounds.
“Citizen’s arrest? Man! What a sea lawyer you turned out to be! Would I give my left nut to of seen that? That bastard Atmon!”
“Joe Beaupre did the worst, with his gun barrel.”
“I never did trust that Beaupre. Junior made a fool out of him in the flrehouse when he couldn’t git his gun out. I figured he’d be looking for a chance to git back at old Junior, but Jesus! Beat his eye out!” Bob shook his head, his eyes staring.
“Did Junior kill Bemis?”
“What? Well, John, I don’t know. Junior’s more or less
a friend of mine. Where d’you stand?”
“Nowhere.”
“Well, I guess old Junior did, more or less. It sure looked like it from where I stood.”
“You saw him do it?”
“No! Now don’t go gitting any ideas I did! No, sir. Nobody see Junior do it. We just see him come out right after. Then we went in and found old Bemis croaked. Junior must of smashed his head in with old Bemis’ own telephone, the way it looked. Damn’ office was on fire, too. Don’t blame Junior a hell of a lot.”
“Who was there?”
“Oh, everybody. All the Riders. Then there was Atmon, Beaupre, Eightball, Keith Joubert, some firemen, Billy Muldrow—Christ-all! With the fire died down a little, Bemis moved over to his own office. We set around out in the lobby. Junior went in and then after a minute he come running out, and there you have it. That’s all I know. Who else could of done it?”
“Somebody could have come in through Mrs. Box’s office.”
“Well, I guess so, John. But it don’t seem likely, after Junior’s fight with Bemis and all. I mean, Junior was still highly pissed-off.”
“Jane doesn’t think he did it.”
Bob shrugged, meaning: Of course, she’s his sister.
“Did you see Junior go into the office? I mean, did you see him open the door?”
“Nobody did. We was having fun with Eightball or something. We see him come out, though.”
“Maybe the place was already burning. What was it, waste-baskets?”
“Ayuh. Beside the desk. Burned up papers, burned the telephone a little, burned Charlie Bemis’ arm. That was before we got over the excitement and thought to put out the fire. Atmon see Junior come running out and tried to grab him. We could see the fire inside. Well, Junior kicked Atmon in the family jewels and goddam, he dropped like a wet turd! Junior run right over him and got away. Joe Beaupre had his gun out this time but he dasn’t shoot. Old Billy Muldrow come in a-yelling ‘Shoot the bastard!’ but they was too many standing around with their faces hanging out.”
“What about the telephone? Was Bemis talking to anybody?”
“That’s the funny part—I mean it was all funny as hell, but Mabel Hinckley was on the line! Honest to God! Bemis just picked up the phone, I suppose, to call somebody up. Mabel says she heard this dull, sickening thud. That’s what she said. Said she knew who done it!” Bob said this and waited, his eyebrows raised, holding back a smile.
“All right, Bob.”
“State police went over to the telephone office to see her, they having got the very same ideas as you. She says Charlie Bemis said, ‘Daisy?’ like that, just before she heard this dull, sickening thud. She says Daisy done it. Daisy made that there dull, sickening thud! Only thing is, the only Daisy we could think of, anybody, was Daisy Colchester. Nobody called her Daisy since 1898! No matter. Mabel Hinckley says Daisy done it!”
But it was not the ridiculous image of Miss Colchester, blunt instrument in hand, that John saw. It was Billy Muldrow, under the prod of inspiration, trying to kill two birds with one stone. “Shoot the bastard!” It really wasn’t too stupid a suggestion, and in that situation the woodsman could act quickly. Billy Muldrow was far from stupid. Daisy done it! A Daisy Bob Paquette had known well. He saw that he would not even be allowed the slightest reasonable doubt; that Leah in her grasping of John Cotter could ask for further union. Now it seemed quite possible that he must sacrifice his friend for Leah’s truth.
CHAPTER 24
He sat on the granite cornerstone of the little Huckins graveyard, his father’s bottle of bourbon between his legs, and turned the bottle grittily on the stone. “Go ahead and have a drink,” he said out loud. “That’s what you brought it for, your father’s guilty bourbon.” But he couldn’t drink.
The tall pines did not move; the maples raised palisades of green leaves that were as immobile as rock. Nothing moved in the amber air of noon. Through smoke the leaves touched by the dull sun were green, yet old, as if they were the leaves of generations past.
He had left Bruce’s car at the bottom of Pike Hill, and now waited for a sign, or catastrophe, or his luck to solve the problem of the coming interview.
He hadn’t had to come. A few words to Bob Paquette, and wouldn’t the town of Leah have gladly snapped poor Billy up! “Daisy was a dog, remember?” And happy logic—the conclusion beautiful for all of Leah—would be quick. He wouldn’t have had to go to the police, to the sheriff, or to the selectmen. Just one little bee in Bob Paquette’s bonnet, and it would have been out of John Cotter’s hands. It would have finished Atmon and Beaupre, too, and he would have been free of that legal worry.
He didn’t say the words to Bob, and when they came down-street, Bob leading on his motorcycle, Mrs. Box came running breastily out of the Town Hall to tell Bob that the Paquette barn was on fire, and he’d better go home. Bob turned without answering, his footrest scraping, and burned rubber as he raised his front wheel off the ground and the hot engine roared. He took the wrong way around the one-way traffic circle, headlong back toward Cascom Corners.
No one was home at the Cotter house, thank God. A note on the kitchen worktable: Johnny we have gone to the hospital Bruce worse love Dad.
Bruce worse love Dad. Worse love, Dad—Bruce. Now he sat with the bourbon warm between his legs and couldn’t drink it. The word for father and son; the synthesis of that painful love seemed to him to lie in the repetition of that word: “Worse, worse, worse, worse,” but the child’s trick of lost meaning wouldn’t work. Neither time nor repetition could always kill a lively pain.
In Manila he had killed a man in a situation that was so classic an example of self-defense that no investigation was felt necessary. He had even received in his knee the best of evidence, a spent bullet. And yet that guiltless crime had never let him be for very long. Red meat grew in the mouth; to think of the fragile brain—the semiliquid complexity of brain—was taboo.
Whether Billy Muldrow went to jail or to the old New Hampshire noose, it would be the same. His woods-quick brain could not comprehend a cage. Neither could it comprehend a padded cell in Concord. “Tight’s a drum, and cozy,” Billy had said of his new little house, but that coziness presupposed an icy wind from the clean, deep woods; it was the coziness of a bear’s den in a ledge. The question was, would Billy understand the nature of his move against Leah? As final as would have been the “adambomb” he wanted to roll down Pike Hill, his extermination of Charlie Bemis meant that if he lost, he died. This choice might, or might not, be a conscious part of the gamble he had taken. John did know that Billy could run amok, and that might be the last defense of any cornered animal.
So he was going to tell Billy of Billy’s death. When, in Manila, he had crept down toward the bullet-holed door, he didn’t know. Now he did. There was no choice, in either case, but to go on and see the destruction at the end. No choice now, because he knew the weight of omission could be greater than the sight of his friend caught and struggling: he could not sneak, his problems solved, and live himself. The only action signifying what love, what dignity there was between friends, must occur in the confrontation to come, whether it was the pity asked for by a child or the hatred in the eyes of a wounded hawk.
He turned to look down upon the town. It, too, looked old through the brown lens of the smoke. The sun was gentle, and shone through the smoke as if through ancient glass, as if through bourbon in a bottle. He held the bottle up to his eyes: Leah preserved.
Before him the graveyard on its tilted ground had been planned for more permanent human occupancy than Leah. The big center-stone dominated the little square, a point of order in a wilderness of advancing trees. The deertrail and the boneless fingers of the birch-bark hand suggested the pleasing asymmetry of the rivers of Leah. Zacharia Calvin Huckins had preferred a tiny stone—one he could have tossed easily upon a wall. Florrie Stonebridge Huckins lay below a slate thin as a knife:
Her load was heavy.
Her back was slim.
Her heart was merry.
Rest her with Him.
And here were the dead children, all the dead children who had missed, among the stones, the living tit of Leah. “Rough,” he said, trying to smile. Perhaps he did smile—he felt his mouth. “Not being blind,” he said as he got up from his stone, “I know not when I smile.” He put the bottle behind Florrie’s slate.
Billy’s truck was parked beside the yellow shack that had NEW HAMPSHIRE HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT stenciled on the side. Red hens hopped in and out of the old wood-silver shack that lay on its side next to the new one. Billy, with his great strength, had simply tipped it off the cellarhole and rolled the new one on. Hens teetered on beer cans and hens scratched with horny yellow claws the pressed earth of Billy’s dooryard. Half wild, they ran silently for cover as John approached.
He deliberately suppressed his inclination to stalk the yellow shack. Movement was visibility, with animal or man, and the need for invisibility was almost unbearable in him. He made himself walk straight to the door. “Billy!” he called. One did not knock on the door of a house in the wilderness.
No answer. He called again before going to the tiny window. All he could see in the darkness was the tiny window opposite, the dark glass looped with dust-strung cobwebs. Around at the front, the door’s padlock was open on the open latch, and he opened the door the maximum tactful inch and called, “Hey, Billy?”
The shack felt occupied. Warmth, or perhaps the slight humidity of breath, moved past his face. The animal smell of Billy, though not unpleasant, was lively in the moving air.
“Billy?”
Cot springs squeaked, and the voice pretended to come, surprised, from sleep: “Ayuh. Who’s there?” Pretending not to know.
“John Cotter.” Your friend, John thought, Come to tell you the news.
“Hi, John!” Billy said. “Come on in and set down.”
John entered, and removed a bowl of nuts and bolts from the chair. “Your breakfast, Billy?” he asked. Billy rolled over, his brown underwear buttoned up to his neck. He dropped his big feet to the floor and felt with his toes for his boots.
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