After Eli

by Terry Kay

  “God Almighty, Tolly,” Garnett whispered in shock. He had not moved from the rocker. The swiftness of the attack had immobilized him. It had taken no more than four seconds.

  Tolly stood over George like a tree. He looked calmly at Garnett and then Curtis.

  “Hope I didn’t hurt you none, Curtis,” he said matter-of-factly. “He pushed me too far.” He stepped across George and walked to the door. “I’ll meet you up at the bridge across Deepstep in the mornin’,” he added. He opened the door and stood for a moment staring at the cars parked in front of Pullen’s Café, and then he was gone.

  18

  MICHAEL LAY on his back across his bed, his legs crossed at the ankles, and counted time in a silent, monotonous ticking that clicked in his mind like a precisioned march. His eyes were closed and he rested peacefully in the silky cradle between sleep and exhilaration. It was a calm that he loved, that intoxicated him like a sweet wine. He was not like other men, he thought. Other men would be tense and fearful, praying for courage. He was at ease.

  He moved his head on the feather pillow and opened his eyes and looked out the window cut into the side of the barn. He could see nothing but a single dim star, like a phosphorous spot smeared on the pane. It was late. Eleven, he imagined. The time was nearing. Soon Owen would be tapping at the window like a timid beggar. He closed his eyes again and began humming the melody of his song, and the words floated on clouds in his mind: “I have loved you with poems… I have loved you with daisies… I have loved you with everything but love…” He smiled at the euphoric giddiness rising in him and he could feel the blood flooding to his loins. He thought of Rachel. Soft. And fierce. And afraid. Yes, above all, afraid. And, also, helpless. He remembered her from the walk of the night before. Touching her, feeling her pull away from him with her weak protest. But she had opened her arms in wings and gathered him to her and he had felt the spasms of that gathering beating inside her. It had happened quickly and she had suddenly been embarrassed. He had held her and kissed her lightly on the eyes and then had led her back to the house. That morning, at breakfast, she had looked at him secretly and her eyes had smiled and he knew her embarrassment was gone.

  She had told him there was no money, no hidden treasures. It was all a story, she had said, one of Eli’s harmless lies. But he knew different. Yes, and she would tell him. What he was about to do would bring her closer and she would open her secrets to him as willingly as she had opened her legs. He smiled again and moved his locked hands behind his head. But what if there was no money? he thought. What if Rachel had told the truth, that it was nothing more than a boasting legend left by Eli, the mocking epitaph of a wanderer? He shrugged as if answering the question for a stranger. Would it really matter? He was content. The search—if it was a search at all—had become as intriguing as the prize.

  * * *

  Tolly Wakefield paused on the bridge crossing Deepstep Creek. He could take the road to the house where the Caufields had lived and died, or he could go through the woods. It was shorter by the woods, though there was a hill to climb and he was tired. Still, it was shorter by the woods, and somehow the distance, and the time to travel it, mattered to Tolly. He wanted to rest, but he could not dismiss the house from his mind. It gnawed at him, aggravated him. There was a picture in his mind of Owen at the house and he wondered why it was there and why he could not push it aside. The Caufield house was the only empty house north of Yale. No one would ever think of Owen hiding there, in the place where murder had been committed. He was a boy. Just a boy. He could not have the courage to go to the Caufield house. Yet Tolly felt it: Owen was at the house. He turned on the bridge and crossed it and he could hear the sound of his footsteps echoing against the creek banks beneath the bridge. He could feel a chill tightening the muscles in his shoulders and neck. Owen would not go to the house by his own choice, he thought. He would never do that.

  Tolly stepped quickly from the road and began his climb up the hill, measuring a straight line to the Caufield house.

  Owen could not judge the time. He had watched the lights blink out in the Pettit house and had waited across the road, squatting in the darkness of a water oak at the edge of the field, until time had no meaning for him. He had stared at the rising moon and the stars that seemed to chase it like small, proud warriors, and he had tried to plot the time, but could not. Only the moon and its chasing stars seemed to move; not time, nor the earth around him, nor space. He had not slept in two days, or if he had, he could not remember it. He was numb and confused. The only thing his mind could hear was Michael’s voice, like a whisper deep in his skull. The voice was his master. It repeated his instructions like a litany, a sweet propaganda that would deliver him safely to the life of a new person in a new world. Owen had never wanted to leave, but he did not know how to stay. He did not know how to disobey the voice that was deep in his skull.

  A star broke apart millions of miles away and sizzled across the universe and died in a single fiery drop beyond the hills above the Pettit house. Owen’s eyes widened and focused on the house. He stood, pulling himself up by the trunk of the oak. There was a dull pain in his neck and he rubbed it gently with both hands. He lifted the sack of provisions that Michael had hidden. He had waited long enough. He walked hesitantly out of the field and crossed the road a hundred yards from the turnoff to the house. He knew he could circle wide and be hidden by the stand of sassafras trees that grew along the house road, and he could reach the barn easily. His neck ached. The pain drove into his spine and his mind flashed to his mother patiently massaging his back after he had fallen from a tree. He had been ten years old and she had made a lotion out of bark and had rubbed it into his muscles. Her hands had been as warm as the lotion. She had told him stories as she tended him—giddy stories that were private—and they had healed him as quickly as the lotion. His mother’s face formed in his mind and then vanished and he found himself standing at the lot fence that looped around the back of the barn from the stables. He saw the mule under the umbrella of a persimmon tree in the barn lot, and the cows rooted into the ground on their great bellies. The cows turned their heads to him like bored onlookers. He caught the fence with his left hand and crept slowly along it, bent forward, his head swiveling from the house to the barn and to the house again. He saw the window in the side of the barn. It looked odd, being there, an out-of-place remedy for the boarder inside. He slipped close to the barn, dragging his shoulder along the slatted planking. Then he was beneath the window and he rose cautiously to full height. His heart was racing, driving the blood into his temples like a storm. He tapped the window lightly with his fingers. Once. Then again. And suddenly there was a face, smiling, pressed against the pane, a round pocket of hollow shadows in the lifeless light of the weak moon. The face mouthed “Wait” and disappeared. Owen dropped to his knees, close against the barn.

  * * *

  Michael opened the barn door carefully and studied the darkened house. There would be no chance that anyone would be awake, but he would not be a bumbler, giving away himself by a careless step. He closed his eyes and read the script of his plan a final time in his memory. He could hear the dying mumbling of the Chautauqua audience and the restless shifting in their seats as they braced to watch and listen. He felt a rush of excitement speeding through him like heat. He breathed deeply in an exercise of calming his eagerness, and then he stepped out of the barn—from the wings of his stage—and walked hurriedly to where Owen waited beneath the window.

  “Owen,” he whispered gladly, kneeling beside Owen and grasping him by the shoulders. “I knew you’d come. I been waitin’, hopin’ you’d not change your mind and leave me to go off alone. But I knew you wouldn’t. I knew it.”

  “I—I didn’t know what time it was,” Owen stammered.

  “Close to midnight. Couldn’t be better.”

  “Are—are you ready?”

  “I am. Got everythin’ packed away in my knapsack,” Michael answered. He turned Owen toward
the north. “Look at that night,” he exclaimed in a hushed voice. “It’s a night for travelin’. Two hours from now, we’ll be lost up near North Carolina, and you’ll feel the weight of it all droppin’ off you like water. Come on, let’s go inside and get the things.”

  Owen crouched down and followed Michael along the front of the barn to the door. Michael pulled Owen inside and eased the door closed. There was no light in the barn and Michael struck a match and gestured for Owen to follow him to his room. In the room, he lit a candle on the floor beside his bed. Owen stood in the middle of the room, holding his sack, waiting.

  “Don’t worry none about the light,” Michael whispered, crossing the room and closing the door leading into the barn. “The window’s away from the house and it’s not enough to show through anyway.” He caught Owen by the shoulders and smiled broadly. “Didn’t I tell you?” he said. “There was nothin’ in that house to frighten you. Nothin’. And you’re here as proof of it.”

  “When—when we leavin’?” Owen asked.

  “In a few minutes. Give you time to catch up to yourself. Come on, sit down.”

  Michael led Owen to the chair and gently pushed him into it, then he stepped to the bed and sat on the edge of it.

  “Here’s my belongin’s,” he said proudly, patting the stuffed knapsack beside the bed. “Got the whole of my life in it, and like I told you in the jail, it’s not worth much. Just some things I’ve gathered along the way.”

  Owen stared at the knapsack.

  “Got plenty for both,” Michael continued. “I been puttin’ away food for a couple of days, and we’ll have enough, what with the things we find in the woods. And we can take our time, Owen, lad. I was in town today. Told the doctor how you’d run off south. Even showed him the way you went. There’ll be nobody chasin’ after us.”

  “You see Tolly Wakefield?” Owen asked quietly.

  “They was out, all of them. The doctor said they’d been in the night before and lit out again this mornin’. Said they’d looked the ridges and along the river and were goin’ over Yale Mountain today.”

  “We better go,” Owen said suddenly.

  Michael stood and walked around the room. He said cheerfully, “It’s a good room I’m leavin’, Owen. A good room. I need to drink in the memory of it.” He turned in the middle of the room. “I used to do this when I was on the circuit, Owen,” he added. “After every show, every place we’d pack up and leave, I’d go to the stage and walk it, keepin’ the memory of it in my own way.”

  Owen sat stiffly in the chair, staring at Michael as though hypnotized.

  “I told you about my actin’ days, didn’t I, Owen?”

  Owen did not answer.

  “Ah, it was a good time,” Michael continued easily. “I was good at it. Yes, I was. No place in the world like a stage. You can be anythin’ you want on a stage. There’s all kinds of plays, Owen, all kinds. Once I played Iago.” He looked at Owen and smiled. “Iago, Owen, Iago. It’s from Shakespeare, from a play called Othello. I could hear the handclappin’ for a week. You know what it’s like? It’s—it’s like hearin’ them tiny bamboo sticks tapping together in the wind. The Chinese wind chime, that’s what. Music, but not music. Clacking little sounds. Ah, it’s somethin’, Owen. It’s somethin’.”

  “We better go,” Owen said again.

  “We will,” Michael replied. “In a minute.” He walked to the bed and sat on it. He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “The newspapers said I’d been the best Iago ever, Owen. Said Iago was the best role out of all of Shakespeare, and I’d done it better than anybody they’d ever seen.” The smile faded. “I used to have that clippin’,” he said. “I lost it.”

  Owen moved in his chair and the chair legs scraped like a yelp on the barn floor. He looked at Michael. Michael was staring into the ceiling and into the distance of another time. Then his eyes closed and he stood beside the bed and bowed gracefully before Owen. A smile locked across his face. He dropped his head suddenly, like a weight, and his arms spread in wings at his sides. He turned the palms of his hands up. The applause of his remembered audience fell around him like flung roses, and the song of their cheers rang in a deafening crescendo. Then his audience faded, dropped from the sight and hearing of his mind, and the seizure of his memory disappeared. He rose slowly, his body stiffening at his waist. His hands came together in front of his chest and he looked at Owen.

  “It’s a thing to remember,” he whispered. “It is.”

  “It’s—it’s late,” Owen said.

  Michael nodded.

  “We’ll be goin’. In a minute,” he mumbled. “In a minute.” He stared into the light of the candle and the bronze tip of the flame blazed in his eyes. “It’s been a long time since I thought about that play,” he said softly. “There’s a role you could’ve played, Owen. Cassio. He was wronged. Like you.” He turned to Owen and laughed easily. “It’s true. Be damned if it’s not.”

  Owen shifted again in his chair. He pulled the sack of provisions in his lap. He tried to avoid Michael’s eyes.

  “Did you kill that young couple, Owen?” Michael asked evenly. “Did you?”

  “N-n-n—no,” Owen stammered.

  “I know it, Owen. You were wronged, like Cassio.”

  “I didn’t do nothin’.”

  Michael took a step forward. He stood over Owen and stared calmly at him.

  “Them men that’s lookin’ for you, they’d be heroes if they found you,” he said. “They would. The whole town’s waitin’. They’re takin’ bets on who it’ll be. Man that finds you, he’ll get the treatment, he will. Drinks on the house. Him tellin’ about it, over and over. People slappin’ him on the back, sayin’ how he made up for that young couple bein’ knifed. You know that, Owen? Do you know that?”

  “I didn’t—didn’t kill nobody.”

  Michael shook his head sadly. He clucked his tongue.

  “But you come in here, wavin’ the knife, sayin’ you’d be splittin’ the throat of those good women asleep in the house if you didn’t get Eli’s money.”

  “No—no, I didn’t.” Owen’s voice was a whine.

  “You shouldn’t’ve done that, Owen. Not with all the help I’ve been to you.”

  “No. No—”

  Michael reached for the knife sheathed at his leg.

  “All this time I been trustin’ you, Owen. Never dreamin’ you’d be turnin’ on me.”

  Owen’s face trembled. The sack of provisions slipped from his hands and fell to the floor. He stood up from the chair and began to back away toward the door.

  “Here, Owen, here’s your knife,” Michael whispered. He tossed the knife at Owen’s feet, against the door. “Now you’ve got me helpless, and there’s nothin’ I can do but look for somethin’ to defend myself with.” He whirled and scrambled across the room. His voice became higher and his accent thickened: “Me lookin’ frantic-like for somethin’, not knowin’ what to do, beggin’ ‘Don’t kill me, Owen, don’t kill me.’” He stopped at the foot of the bed and reached to the floor and turned back to Owen. “And luck would have it—blind Irish luck—but I find a pitchfork I’d been mendin’.” He held the pitchfork before him.

  Owen stood frozen against the door. His heart quivered. His tongue felt wadded in his mouth. His arms raised helplessly, automatically, above his head. His right foot touched the knife on the floor.

  “Yes,” Michael began to whisper. “Yes, yes, yes.” He could feel the perspiration oozing from his palms. The music began faintly in his mind and he could see vague dots of faces in his audience, people squirming, shoving against the space separating them from the power of his presence.

  “Plea—please,” Owen begged.

  Michael stepped into the full light of the candle. He held the pitchfork before him, like a lance.

  “I’d like to be helpin’ you,” he said soothingly. “I’d like to, but what could I do? You comin’ in here like this, wavin’ your knife—likely the one t
hat’s cut the throat of that young couple—vowin’ to do in them poor ladies asleep in the house. You shouldn’t’ve done that, Owen. Makin’ me do this.”

  Owen’s face turned to the door. He closed his eyes and locked his trembling knees and pushed up on his toes.

  Michael was breathing hard. He heard his audience gasp, heard their great collective “No!”, heard the concert of their horror spilling in panic as they grabbed one another like victims of an executioner’s gun. The music soared in him and the searing eye of an imagined spotlight covered him with its heat. He raised the pitchfork and leaped across the floor, driving it hard into Owen’s throat, pinning him against the door.

  Owen’s eyes snapped open in surprise. His tongue rolled in his opened mouth and a stream of blood spurted over his lips and down his chin and dripped across his chest. The face of his mother flew into the silver shell of his mind. He felt her fingers on him. His head swiveled back against the door and he died.

  Michael stood, pushing with his weight against the pitchfork. Through the handle he could feel Owen’s body convulse and then relax as his life left him. A blinding white heat sliced through Michael’s brain like a whiplash and he shook his head to clear it. Then he stepped tentatively away. The pitchfork held Owen to the door like a limp bundle.

  Michael stared at the dead man before him. The room was quiet. There was no audience. No music. No light. No sound. He closed his eyes to bring his audience back before him, to hear their applause. There was nothing.