The Hush

by John Hart

  Deer like that were not supposed to exist.

  CHAPTER SIX

  William Boyd stood on the porch and watched the car fall away. It crossed the creek, crested the second hill and was gone. Even then, he stood for long minutes and held himself with care.

  If he saw Martha, he’d hit her.

  He was that angry.

  Replaying the visit in his mind, he grew convinced that he’d hidden the worry and the rage. If the lawyers had seen them they’d wonder at their cause, and wonder led to questions. William Boyd disliked questions. If forced to answer them, he’d prefer to do so in New York or Washington, not on the bitter edge of some pissant town. Beyond that simple concealment, he’d also developed a decent idea of the types of people he would be forced to deal with. Jack Cross was as he’d expected: intelligent, devoted to his friend, depressingly earnest. Leslie, too, failed to surprise. She was a player, and for a moment he considered it—the tight skirt, the blond hair.

  “Martha!”

  She was close. He could smell the perfume.

  “Yes.”

  Turning, he found her in the open door. “Walk with me.” He pushed past her, and she trailed behind. At the door to his private study, he stopped. “What have I told you about this room?”

  “No one is to go inside without your express permission.”

  “And yet?”

  “It was an accident, Mr. Boyd. I went looking for you. I didn’t think—”

  “Need I lock doors in my own home?”

  “No, sir, of course not.”

  “Visitors are to be instructed. Am I clear? Tell them where to wait, and make sure they do so.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where is Mr. Kirkpatrick?”

  “He was in the gym earlier. I believe he’s returned to his room.”

  “Find out if he’s showered and dressed. If so, ask him to join me in the study.”

  “Do you mean—?”

  “Yes, this study. Go on, now.”

  She left, and Boyd poured another drink at the sideboard. Sitting at the desk, he sipped thirty-year scotch and replayed what he knew of James Kirkpatrick, a coal-country billionaire grown rough working the mountains and coves of West Virginia. He liked to fight and hunt and make money, and because of that Boyd actually liked the man. But that’s not why he was here. Kirkpatrick was looking for the right place to park two hundred million dollars, and William Boyd wanted the account. That took work and convincing. They’d hunted buffalo in Africa, tiger on the subcontinent. They’d been drunk and shared secrets and chased girls fresh out of college.

  Now they were here.

  Boyd swirled liquor in the glass, and did the math in his head: 2 percent management fee plus 20 percent of any profits.

  “Definitely worth the risk.”

  “Are you talking about me?”

  “Jesus, James.” Boyd rose and let a smile touch his face. “How does someone as big as you get to be so damn quiet?”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  Kirkpatrick crossed the room. He was fifty-five and stood six-three, his shoulders heavy and broad, his hands scarred over wrists as wide as other men’s ankles. Gray bristles covered his head and cheeks, so that his eyes, in the center, seemed brighter than they otherwise might. Boyd waited until he sat, then went to the sideboard, poured another scotch, and handed it over. “I was talking about the hunt.”

  “Are you worried?”

  “Not really.”

  “What’s his name again?”

  “Johnny Merrimon. We’ll handle him.”

  “The last time you took a client near Johnny Merrimon, he shot up your camp and damn near killed you.”

  “It’s worth the risk. Cheers.”

  They clinked glasses, and Boyd sat. They were friends in a loose sense, but Kirkpatrick understood the dance. “How’s the market?”

  “I don’t follow the markets when I hunt. I have people for that.”

  Kirkpatrick grunted because he felt the same way. Hire well. Delegate. He waited a long minute, then spoke without actually looking at the giant deer head on the wall. “So that’s it?”

  “It is.”

  “Six months, William. That’s how long you’ve made me wait.”

  Boyd shrugged. “I only show it to a special few.”

  “May I?”

  “It’s why we’re here.”

  Kirkpatrick put down his glass and they crossed the room, Kirkpatrick in front. He moved steadily, but Boyd sensed the disbelief. He’d brought two potential clients to this place. All of them had the same reaction.

  “May I touch it?”

  “Gently,” Boyd said. “It’s very old.”

  The big hand reached out, fingers on coarse fur at the base of the animal’s neck. “All this time. I thought you were lying, exaggerating.” His voice thickened. “Jesus. I’ve never seen anything like this. Never heard of it.” He turned finally. “Your grandfather shot this here?”

  “It’s a special place.”

  “Are there others like it?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Boyd led Kirkpatrick through an arched doorway into a second room at the rear of the study. There was a bookshelf, two chairs, a leather sofa. Photographs and maps covered two walls. On a third hung the largest bear hide Kirkpatrick had ever seen. “What in the name of God…”

  “I took that bear the same day the Merrimon kid shot up my camp.”

  “It’s not possible. This is … It’s … This is enormous.”

  Boyd didn’t share the rest of the story: that they’d actually killed two bear that day, and that the second hide hung proudly on a wall of his newest client’s. “Remarkable, isn’t it?”

  “‘Remarkable’? My God, man. This…” Kirkpatrick spread his palms as if to capture some intangible thing. “This is inexplicable. It’s extraordinary. These animals. How do you explain it?”

  “I can’t.”

  “What about your grandfather?”

  “That’s him.” Boyd lifted a framed newspaper clipping from the wall and showed it to Kirkpatrick. The headline read: LOST BOY RETURNED TO MOTHER. Beneath it was a photograph, and in it, the boy was black-eyed and gaunt, with bandaged hands and dark splotches on his cheeks. Behind him, snow drifted against an unpainted shack. His mother, beside him, was unsmiling.

  Kirkpatrick pointed at the boy’s face. “Is that frostbite?”

  “They say it was the coldest winter in a hundred years.”

  “And the deer?”

  “My grandfather was lost in the swamp for three days. When they found him, the deer was dead at his feet, the gun frozen to a tree beside him.”

  Kirkpatrick tilted the picture, leaned closer. “What happened to him?”

  Boyd shrugged. “He went hunting with two friends. The friends came home after a day and a night. My grandfather didn’t. It took a hundred people two days to find him.”

  “Tell me the story.”

  Boyd smiled. “The story is for clients.”

  “So, it’s like that?”

  Boyd shrugged, and did not apologize. “My grandfather never spoke of what happened in the swamp. After they found him, he barely spoke at all: a word here or there, a little more when he finally married.” From the bookshelf, Boyd removed a leather journal that was old and stained and battered. He took a chair and Kirkpatrick took the other. “This is his journal.”

  “Written after the swamp?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I see it?”

  “I want a decision first.”

  “Two hundred million is a lot of money.”

  “Investments, hunting, the journal. Life matters, my friend, as do the people with whom we share it.”

  Kirkpatrick studied Boyd’s face, then the newspaper clipping. The frame was mahogany, the glass polished. There was something about the boy, the starkness of the old photograph. “His hair is white.”

  “I know.”

  “Why?” />
  “Something to do with what happened in the swamp. That’s how it was when they found him.”

  Kirkpatrick drummed his fingers; stared at the journal on the arm of Boyd’s chair. “How many others know the story?”

  “Other than me, you would be the third.”

  “The other two?”

  “Clients now. You’d like them.”

  Kirkpatrick rose from the chair and walked along the photographs that covered two walls. Old and faded, they showed the white-haired boy at different ages. A teenager. A young man. In one, he leaned on a plow behind a mule. In another, he stood beside a plain-faced girl in a flower-print dress. She was smiling; he wasn’t. In all the pictures, he remained thin and unhappy. He never filled out; the eyes never changed. The most recent photograph showed him in the uniform of an army private. A date scratched in the corner said the picture was taken in March of 1942.

  “My grandfather died on Omaha Beach; never got off the sand. This was in his pocket when it happened.” Boyd pressed a palm on the journal. “He wrote about the swamp the night before they stormed the beach. It’s almost as if he knew.”

  “What? That he would die?”

  “I think he wanted the story known, at least to his wife.”

  “The battlefield confession of a traumatized halfmute. Hardly the most convincing document.”

  “Yet the pages speak for themselves.”

  Boyd placed the journal on a small table, and Kirkpatrick stopped pacing. “Two hundred million dollars?”

  “It’s a fair start.”

  Kirkpatrick sat, and the stare between them held. Big men. Big money. The outcome, though, had never been in doubt, not in this room in this place, not with a dead man’s journal bloodstained and closed tight on the table beside them.

  “It better be a damn good story.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1931

  A Lord of the Forest

  Like many boys in that bitter time, Randolph Boyd knew cold and hunger better than he should. The old folks blamed the economy or the Great War or what people still called the Crash of ’29, but none of that meant a thing to Randolph or his two best friends or any other county boys whose houses seemed emptier than most. Course, there were plenty of boys without fathers—that was the thing about war—but it was harder for Randolph than it was for Charlie down the road, whose father won a medal before he died, or for Herbert, whose father took a bullet clean while fighting with the French at the Somme. Randolph’s father came home alive, but it was still the war that killed him. A German bullet took half his face in October of 1918, three weeks before it all ended and other fathers came home without their jaws shot off and hurt so deep in the marrow, no kind of love could touch it.

  But that’s how it was for Randolph’s father. The pretty wife couldn’t make a difference, nor could the parents, proud but wounded. Not even the son too young and innocent to recognize the horror of his father’s face could smile bright enough to lift the shadows from those haunted eyes. According to Herbert, who’d heard it from his mother, the homecoming lasted three months before the rifle came out from under the bed that husband and wife tried so hard to use as it had once been used. But what woman could kiss a face like that? That had come from Herbert’s mother, too, whispered in the dark of a sleepover when she thought the boys long since down for the night. Randolph was nine when she’d said it, and even now, five years later, it hurt to think that the ultimate failing had belonged to his mother, an uncomplaining woman who’d chopped wood and carried ice until her face was as sunken as any warship torpedoed in that horrible war. Looking at her now, Randolph thought: She’s only thirty-one. But she looked half-dead in the gray light by the cold stove, her hands bony and thin as she crinkled paper and fed kindling and tried to light a match without shaking.

  “Let me do it.”

  Randolph took the matches and lit the paper. The old clock on the mantel said it was 4:55 in the morning. Outside, a hard snow ticked on the glass window.

  “I’ll make breakfast for you before you go.”

  His mother pushed herself up and clanked around in the empty cupboards. She’d said breakfast but meant flour and lard and the last scrapings of bacon grease.

  “They’ll be here any second,” Randolph said.

  “Well, they’re not here yet.”

  She ignored the impatience etched on the boy’s face, and he peered once more through the window before sitting at the small table set with two-tined forks and scratched metal plates. His father’s chair was long removed, so it was just the two chairs now. Against his mother’s was propped the same Springfield rifle his father had fought with in the war, and used twelve years ago to take apart the rest of his skull. Randolph could shoot it better than most. He’d won competitions at the county fair and, two years ago, brought home a thirty-pound turkey after outshooting the mayor himself. He’d handled the rifle since he was seven, and broke it down one more time to check the action. Metallic sounds rang in the kitchen, and the smell of gun oil rose. Working the bolt a final time, he fed in the last five bullets he owned and put the gun against the wall, looking at his mother as he did so. A year ago she’d have told him to work on the rifle someplace else, but cold air and hunger weighed her down.

  She was starving, Randolph thought.

  They both were.

  “Here you go, son.” She spooned mush onto the plate. “Eat it while it’s hot.”

  “You’re not having any?”

  “Not really hungry.”

  The smile that cracked her face was as worn and forced as anything Randolph had ever seen. He looked at her eyes instead. There was life there, and love. What sat on his plate was the last food in the house. “Eat a little bit,” he said. “Just so I don’t worry.”

  “Okay, baby. Maybe a little.”

  She sat beside him, and they ate from the same plate. The mush was black in places, but that was the good part, the burnt grease. Leaving the last black bite on the plate, Randolph pushed it across the table. “I’m full,” he said, and stood before she could argue.

  “Is it time?” she asked.

  “Don’t you hear it?”

  “What?”

  “The squeak in Herbert’s left boot.”

  “You can really hear that? I don’t…” She stopped when she saw the smile on his face. “You’re funning me.”

  “Just a little.” He lifted the rifle and kissed her cheek. “I’ll meet them at the end of the drive. You eat that last bit.” He pointed at the burnt mush, and saw that she was crying. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Herbert and Charlie will be with me. We have guns.”

  “You know what they say about that place.”

  Her eyes glistened in the dim light, and in the silence behind her words, the snow ticked harder on the glass. “Those colored folks are nice enough, Momma. I don’t think they’d hurt us.”

  “I’m not talking about the colored folks, and you know it.”

  “We need food.”

  “I know we do. But do you have to hunt there?”

  She sat straighter, and some of the old steel showed. Randolph wanted to give her a better answer, but they both knew the truth. “County’s hunted out,” he said. “Even the rabbits are getting scarce, and you know what they say about rabbits.” He thought the joke might lift another smile, or that she’d scold him for teenage impertinence. But she was too hungry for that, and too afraid. “It’s not just us,” he said. “We have to think of others, too.”

  He meant Charlie and Herbert, old friends with families equally starved. It was the same across most of the county—joblessness and poverty, the bitter winter that refused to end.

  “People have gone lost in that swamp,” she said. “Some have come back half-mad and ruined, and those that weren’t are still frightened of shadows and filled with crazy stories.”

  “I know,” he said. “But that won’t be me.”

  “Promise me you’ll be careful.”

  “I will.”<
br />
  She took one of his hands with both of hers. Even with the fire and cooking, her skin was cold. “Stay clear of the coloreds,” she said. “Watch for thin ice.”

  “Everything’s frozen solid. There is no thin ice.”

  He thought the logic would help, but fresh tears glittered in the seams of her face. “Charlie gets lost,” she reminded him. “He gets turned around and confused, and Herbert can’t shoot straight, so you stay behind him or well off to the side.”

  “I know. I’ll take care of them.”

  “One more thing.” She reached into an apron pocket and pressed a brass lighter into his hand. “It was your daddy’s from the war, and I know he valued it.” She smoothed her son’s jacket, pulled it tight across his chest. “I filled it in town last week, thinking maybe it was time you have it. He was a good man, your father. But for the war and what it did to him, he’d have never left us like this. I want you to believe me when I say that. Can you do that for me? Can you trust me when I say it’s true? That he was a good man?”

  Randolph studied the metal cylinder in his hand. It was newly polished, but scratched and dented and old. He had vague memories of the lighter, or maybe they were memories of a dream he’d once had. Whatever the case, he could picture his father near the end, how he’d sit before the fire with the lighter in one hand and a knitted scarf drawn across the ruin of his face. He’d turn the lighter in long fingers and watch firelight in the metal. He’d prized it more likely than not—Randolph thought his mother was right about that—but whatever places those flickers took the old man—whatever memories they conjured—none of it stopped him from kneeling on a rock by the creek and blowing off the crown of his skull.

  * * *

  In the yard, Randolph rolled his collar against the snow, then walked to the drive and looked back at the house. Small and unpainted, it was the same color as the snow and sludge, the old barn and frozen metal. Wind took smoke as it left the chimney, and Randolph raised a hand to his mother, who was small behind the frosted glass. She waved in return, and he watched her through the snow, feeling it settle on his shoulders, the brim of his hat. Two months’ wind had piled drifts against the house, and against the old car, rusted solid. Randolph lifted his hand higher, then made for the road, knowing that if he lingered, his mother would stay by the glass until the fire burned out and the kitchen went cold.