by Chris Bauer
I let out a grateful sigh and hoped no one noticed, ashamed my prayer had been answered.
15
Kerm the coroner pronounced the baby dead on the riverbank, said the death would be investigated. The whole thing left me sick to my stomach, watching the police put the small body bag in a container in the rear of Kerm’s station wagon, right there next to a longer bag with Rolf Volkheimer’s fully clothed skeleton in it.
As disgusted as I felt already, I couldn’t go home yet. Something else needed handling, and I needed to handle it now.
My truck chugged up the grassy incline and I circled it to the front of Mrs. V’s house, the tires crunching the stones in her half-moon driveway. I turned off the key with the truck in neutral. It drifted to a stop in front of her porch.
It didn’t make a difference if the authorities officially accused me of killing her husband or not, or that it had been an accident. Probably no way to prove it, but I knew it was me who’d done it. Back when I was a kid, when I heard about his supposed kidnapping, it choked me up pretty good. The man had been real kind to me, and accident or not, I took his life, so now I had to tell his widow.
Her oak front door was already open, the springs on the outer screen so old and forgiving, they didn’t make any real noise when I stepped through. “Hello? Mrs. Volkheimer?”
Her sweet old voice answered me. “In the parlor.”
She was seated in a tufted red chair next to a sofa, a photo album on her lap. Her head lifted to acknowledge me; she put the album on a table. She had a smile, somber but warm, and the tilt of her face said she was glad to see me. With some effort she pushed against the chair’s padded arms to raise herself, then she started across the parlor without her cane, taking tiny steps. I should have met her halfway, but my feet weren’t cooperating.
“Ma’am, I need to talk with you.”
She arrived and reached up with both arms, her fingers wagging for me to lean down, and for one brief, timeless moment, I got the most comforting hug I’d ever had. I dug my hanky out of a trouser pocket, dabbed my eyes.
“I know you do, Wump,” she said, squeezing my arm. “I’ve been watching from the back porch. How about we have some hot tea and Tang, hmm?”
Her kitchen door swung open two rooms away, and as her cook came through it with a tray, the smell of sauerkraut and pork was pulled in with her. Sunday dinner, Mrs. V told me, her daughters and their families expected at four. The place would be overrun with her children, and the children of her children, and their children, too. “And won’t my family have a lot to talk about,” she said, pointing me to a parlor chair.
She waited for her cook to leave. “Wump, before you say anything, you need to understand something.”
“Mrs. Volkheimer,” I started, knowing the only thing needing understanding was what I had to say, “I’m so sorry about what happened to your husband. That’s why I’m here. See, one day when I was a kid—”
“I remember the day well, Wump.”
She surprised me with this statement, but then again of course she’d remember it. It was the day her husband went missing. The same day the town heard how an orphan kid shot off part of a man’s finger with the man’s own rifle. But there wasn’t nearly as much tongue wagging going on about me and Zerhoffer, considering its competition. And also considering that later on, Sister Irene had offered Zerhoffer a deal: I didn’t get sent upstate to a home for incorrigible boys, and in return Sister dropped her complaint against him for abusing his son. And his boy made out, too. Her complaint put enough of the fear of God into the boy’s father to set the man straight. That, and Sister’s frequent unannounced visits to their place for some time after.
“Years later your incident with the man’s gun came back to me,” she said. Her damp eyes told me this memory was painful. “Why is it, might you think, I’ve wanted repairs to my bridge kept to the first floor? Hmm?”
After a few seconds thinking about her question, I got the chills. “You telling me you knew he was up there?”
She sipped her tea. “Rolf left on one of his infrequent trips to Deutschland, this one to help with the dispersal of a dead relative’s estate. He was to take a train then board an ocean liner. The Liberty Belle of the Atlantic, out of Philadelphia.” A far-off look crossed her face. “It wasn’t like he was expecting any sort of monetary settlement from the will. Just planning to tie up loose ends on the other side for him and his brothers, Rolf being the oldest. And the most trustworthy.”
Bet my wrinkled ass he was. The only trustworthy one. Hugh Volkheimer was the son of one of them other brothers. A businessman with no conscience.
“One of our wait staff boarded his baggage on the train so Rolf could attend Mass before his trip. The train was less than a mile down the track when it was stopped by men on horseback. Bandits. We had some of that going on back then, even around here.”
“A train robbery?”
“So it appeared,” she said, flattening out her cloth napkin on her lap. “They made everyone empty their purses and pockets, and went about asking all the male passengers for their names. Then they made four of the men, all Germans, get off the train. They also had a railroad employee find Rolf’s steamer trunk in the baggage car.”
I remembered this now. The men they pulled off the train had children. A few of them ended up at the orphanage.
“A note appeared in my postbox the next day. It said to put ten thousand dollars in gold coins in the last pew of the church, or they’d kill my husband.”
“But he wasn’t on the train, so how, I mean, why—”
“But his baggage was. The bandits had to think he was one of the men they’d taken, maybe figured Rolf wouldn’t admit to who he was, given the stakes.
“I took the money to the church myself. Rolf was to be released the next day. The waiting was horrible. Every day I expected him to walk through the front door. Every day, for weeks. Oh, how I loved that man.
“A month or so later the police found three bodies inside Rolf’s trunk in a cave in the northern woods, none of them Rolf. The fourth man abducted was never found. I turned on them. Turned on the police, the politicians, Rolf’s brothers, even the Church. And I sued the railroad. Lost of course, but I didn’t care. I caused everyone so much trouble, bitter as I was, the town wanted no part of me for years. The bandits were never found. A few summers after Rolf was declared dead, I went looking for things to donate to the orphanage. That’s when I found his body.
“Funny thing is, no one smelled anything. A rotting corpse stinks to high heaven, but the weather had been heavy snows on and off, well into March. It’s something I remember, the weather that winter. Had me wondering if Rolf could have been out there in it, a frozen body on a frozen countryside. Instead he was a frozen body in a cold attic. When the thaw hit in the spring, the stink of all the tanneries was there to disguise the smell. I went back into the attic space only once afterward, to paint over the windows.”
Jesus. Fifty years he’d been up there. How could she have stayed quiet for so long? And for Christ sake, why?
“I don’t understand, ma’am. Why not take his body down when you found him, if for nothing else, to give him a decent burial?”
Her eyes were still so clear for her age. I’d known this woman my whole life, and them blue eyes were studying me like a referee about to count out a jumble-headed boxer who didn’t know enough to fall down.
“You were in your early twenties around when I found him, correct?”
That would have been right. Adding twelve or thirteen years to when I shot off Zerhoffer’s finger would have made me around twenty-four. Fresh out of prison, and not too long after Viola and me were married. Mrs. V had just gotten me the job at the tannery. Life was starting to turn around for me.
Oh.
“I was already fond of you and your young wife, Wump.”
“You left him up there because of me? You knew it was me who shot him?”
“As I recollected, Rolf
went missing the same day you’d taken potshots at that fool Zerhoffer near the bridge, so I pieced it together. You had become a good and decent young man, Wump; I couldn’t take the chance. They would have torn apart the bridge looking for evidence of foul play, might have sent you back to prison even though Rolf’s death had been an accident. So I said goodbye to him, apologized for what I was about to do, padlocked the attic’s trap door, and removed the ladder.”
I was speechless. I swallowed hard, struggled to find my voice. “Pardon me, Mrs. Volkheimer, but”—out came my hanky again—“I’m so sorry about your husband. And I don’t know what else to say other than thank you, so very, very much, for your kindness.”
“Oh, hush. It was the right thing to do. As far as Rolf’s burial goes”—she looked out the back window at the beauty of her manicured lawn and the three bridges—“before, now, later, it didn’t much matter how it worked out, in my opinion. My will says to rebuild the whole bridge within a year of my death, so he would have gotten his Catholic burial soon after I had mine. It would have been romantic, don’t you agree?”
What I was thinking was, unlike poor Rolf, I maybe dodged one of the biggest bullets in my life right there. I nodded.
Wait. There was something else.
“Here,” I said, reaching into my jacket pocket. “I almost forgot.” I extended my hand to her, Rolf’s silver snuffbox in my palm. “This was how I knew it was your husband.”
I saw her crinkled lips part slightly, heard the breath she took suddenly cut itself in half like a butcher had cleaved it. She looked at the snuffbox in my hand then raised her troubled eyes to greet mine. There was a fright in them so overpowering it made me think she was about to die right here and now.
“Mrs. Volkheimer. Are you all right? What’s wrong?”
She turned her head in the direction of the parlor’s overburdened fireplace mantle. Above it were hanged family pictures, many of Rolf. Grainy photographs of him as a mature man plus two painted portraits of the same. One showed him sitting in this parlor, holding the snuffbox on his knee. The mantle was cluttered with trinkets that ran its entire length, all except for a foot or so of empty space directly beneath his portrait, where something was missing.
“I left his body up there, entombed, in the bridge attic,” she said, her lips trembling, “but I took his snuff box with me.”
16
I had no natural explanation for this, other than maybe someone was playing tricks. She accepted my story, something she didn’t ask for but I gave her anyway, that I had nothing to do with any snuffbox moving from her mantle to the footbridge to be reunited with its owner’s remains. Mrs. V’s gardener Horst and his wife, now they were possibilities. I knew she’d question them about it, but I could tell she was already ruling them out, too. No sensible motive, far as she could figure, and I agreed with her.
That left us to think about Rolf’s spyglass. Mrs. V and me couldn’t make head or tails about that neither, Rolf up in the footbridge’s half-story attic space, looking out the window with a sea captain’s telescope before leaving on his trip to Germany. It weren’t anything of significance to her, the spyglass was, so with no fond memories attached to it—no memories of it at all, she said—she’d left it behind with the body.
I had so much stuff in my head from the past couple of days it was a wonder I could find my way home, but home was where I was headed, to do some catching up with Viola, and to eat my supper if I could stomach it. Dead babies and an old Bible that Father Duncan said was written by the Devil himself. Then there was our crazy, lecherous Monsignor. Make it two crazy monsignors, if you counted the one who ran the parish back when I was a kid. And a tannery that was poisoning the town but hadn’t been found out yet. Finding Rolf Volkheimer’s skeleton, and learning his beloved snuff box had joined back up with him postmortem by a full fifty years, this hadn’t made things any smoother. Been a bumpy ride lately. Near as bumpy a ride as my truck was giving me right now. Had to be the clutch. One more block and I’d be home.
Rolf’s view from the bridge’s window back then would have been the tannery shanties to his left at say, ten o’clock, all since turned under and replaced by row homes; the fronts of Our Lady’s church and school buildings straight ahead; and the orphanage property on the right from about one to two o’clock. Farther right of the orphanage had been, and still were, some vegetable gardens sharing space with tree swings for the kids, same as when I lived there, except now there were swing sets and metal sliding boards and see-saws, and a few stacks of them bone-jarring iron monkey bars. The side of the footbridge was where me and Zerhoffer first got into it, then he stumbled around the bridge’s squared corner, me following him with the man’s rifle, the two of us ending up where Rolf could have seen us for only a moment or two before I pulled the trigger.
Viola had a real nice Sunday supper waiting for me that I could smell as soon as I stepped through the front door. Corned beef and cabbage. One little problem with it, though: I gave up corned beef and cabbage for Lent. Hell, she must not have remembered so I wasn’t gonna remember for her. I was hungry, and there weren’t much that could stand in the way of me and corned beef and cabbage, least of all some made-up Lenten obedience vow.
Wait.
Wait just a goddamn minute.
Obedience.
Them babies got tossed away not because of town poverty; it had been a religious directive. Zerhoffer as much as said it the day I shot off his finger, talked about how the Church took the life of his first son. “Won’t catch me being so obedient again,” were his words.
I always had the Catholic Church pegged as a New Testament, Jesus-and-Mary-loving bunch of pleasant folks, but now I wasn’t so sure. It must have been pure thou-shalt-not-disobey-else-you’re-gonna-feel-the-wrath-of-the-Old-Testament bullshit that had made them people do what they did to their newborns. A test of their faith, maybe. Hell, what did I know? It still didn’t make enough sense. Something was missing. The Church’s “why.” But one thing I did decide on. The Church told them parents they had to make this sacrifice. Christ, how could anyone have been so cruel?
I gave Viola a peck on the cheek, then a hug. “Honey, I need to call Father Duncan after we eat.”
“But Johnny, you’ve been gone all day. Why on earth—?”
“I’ll tell you about it over supper, sweetie.”
Also figured to remind her of my abstinence vow for Lent, but not till we were done eating.
“Father’s out at the cemetery, ja,” Mrs. Gobel told me over the phone, me at home, her speaking above the racket the rectory’s kitchen radio was making. She danke-schoened me for fixing the sink drain pipe yesterday. I danke-schoened her back for saying she’d leave Father a message, the message being I wanted to talk with him after Sister Magdalena’s funeral on Wednesday. I also asked her if Monsignor Fassnacht was still feeling under the weather.
“Monsignor has been in his room since Saturday afternoon, ja. He has had visits from some frauleins. The ladies, they make him feel better, ja?”
Ja. They were making him feel much better even right now, the loud music told me.
It was after dinner and Viola was all up to speed on Rolf Volkheimer and how I shot him. It upset her some, knowing I took a man’s life and there weren’t a war involved. Still, she’d come to grips years ago with how violent my childhood was, and how I became a jailbird and all, so I got some leeway. She said to me, “You were only a child, Johnny. Mourn his death, but not your part in it.” Now the TV was on; she had me watching Ed Sullivan, figuring it would calm me down. Which made it not such a good time for me to tell her some of my reasoning behind the infant deaths. She’d get upset about me picking on the Catholic Church.
I also didn’t tell her how old I been feeling lately neither, and about how maybe I was slowing down some. Would never say that to her.
And for sure I didn’t tell her how pissed I was at the city for ignoring what Hugh Volkheimer’s tannery was doing, else she’d have s
een clear through it and confronted me with some now-you-listen-to-me finger-raising, with her guessing I might be planning on doing something about it, and her being right.
Sullivan had the Italian mouse-puppet Topo Gigio on tonight. This would have me sawing wood on the couch for sure. And when the Sullivan show was over Viola would kiss me on the forehead then go off to bed, and I’d wake up in the middle of a loud snore like I usually did, sometime after ten o’clock was my guess.
Then I planned to go out.
The chisel felt like an icicle in my hand, chilly as it was down here.
CLINK-a-chip-chip.
There was once a part of me willing to do the right thing. Willing to blow the whistle and let the authorities handle the punishment. When we first learned Harry had the leukemia, I called the mayor’s office and told someone on his staff that the water around here tasted funny. “My boy’s real sick, and the water in this town is causing it,” I’d said. I was told they’d heard it before, and “you ought to get yourself a water purifier, old man.” No water purifier I knew of could purify this water.
CLINK-a-chip-chip.
“Don’t the home’s pipes rot out a lot?” young Leo said to me last month. Him and me were replacing a sink pipe in the orphanage kitchen, just like what I did yesterday in the rectory. His question got me to thinking: well water. The orphanage hadn’t switched over to city water until a few years ago. My Viola worked as an orphanage housekeeper and housemother for more than fifteen years, left that job for the church housekeeping job, when she was in her thirties. She’d washed dishes in that water; bathed kids in that water. Drank it, too.
Five miscarriages she had during those fifteen years. Five.
CLINK-a-chip-chip.