A Stranger Here Below

by Charles Fergus

He knew she wasn’t stupid or silly. But he didn’t share her belief in visions or spirits or the supernatural—or being able to read the future or perceive the past.

  “Maybe you just had a dream,” he said.

  “No. I wasn’t asleep.” She turned back toward him. “I did see something. A man and a woman, arguing. And two candles that went out. I don’t know who those people were, or when it was, or where. But I tell you, I saw it.”

  He didn’t respond right away.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “True,” he said, “I don’t have to think the same way you do. I don’t have to believe everything you believe or see everything that you see. I love being with you, talking with you, loving you. I will never get tired of that.” He was quiet for a moment. “I’m sure you did see something. I just wish I knew what it meant.”

  Before she could reply, he kissed her on the lips. Her mouth opened to his. He circled his hand over her belly, then moved it downward. She caught her breath and pressed against him.

  My silent dust beneath the ground,

  There’s no disturbance there

  Four

  “Go ahead and shoot!”

  Alonzo Bell, deputy sheriff, lay on his back at the far end of the ore pit. He had taken off his hat. Against the orangish dirt, his bald head appeared pale as a dab of early snow. Jutting up between his bent knees was a weathered board four feet tall. On the board Alonzo had used a piece of charcoal to make a target, a black circle three inches across.

  Ganz narrisch it was: completely crazy. “Alonzo!” Gideon yelled to his deputy. “This is not safe!”

  Yesterday Gideon had found Judge Biddle’s body. This morning the coroner had delivered the autopsy report. There were no surprises: death from massive wounding to the heart and lungs caused by a self-inflicted shotgun blast. Now Hiram Biddle’s enshrouded remains lay in the walnut coffin that the town’s best carpenter had built and taken to Dr. Beecham’s house. Tomorrow, the coffin would go into the ground.

  After getting the coroner’s report, Gideon had gone to the judge’s house, put a bridle on the gelding Jack, and walked him to the livery barn where he kept his mare Maude. He dreamed of someday owning a place with a barn and a fenced lot and maybe even enough pasture to keep horses. But for now he would have to pay board for both Maude and the gelding.

  After arranging for the livery to take Jack, Gideon had gone back to the judge’s house. He wheelbarrowed Old Nick’s wooden box to his own house, the dog following along obediently. He set the box in the back yard. True had come out and given Old Nick some meat scraps. The setter had wagged his tail and licked her hand.

  At the jail, Gideon let Alonzo talk him into riding out to shoot mark, even though they had a prisoner. Henry Peebles was sitting in a cell awaiting trial for gouging out one man’s eye and biting off another’s thumb during a brawl in Hammertown, as the seamy side of Adamant was known. Gaither Brown, a part-time deputy with a leatherworking shop down the street, agreed to bring his work—he was tooling some leather for a saddle—and sit in the jail’s front office, keeping an eye on things while Gideon and Alonzo went out and practiced shooting.

  “Your gun’s loaded!” Alonzo yelled. “Go ahead and empty it!”

  Gideon had already shot at stumps and old bottles, sending shards of green and brown glass whizzing across the ore pit. After each shot, he swabbed the rifle’s bore, then poured powder down the barrel, used the hickory rod to ram home a lead ball wrapped in a linen patch, and primed the pan.

  His ears rang. When he swallowed, he tasted burnt gunpowder. In the matter of shooting the charge now loaded in the rifle, Alonzo was correct: For safety’s sake, before being placed in its scabbard for the ride back to town, the weapon should be discharged. Though not necessarily in the direction of a man with a target clamped between his knees.

  Gideon winced as he settled the butt plate against his shoulder. Tomorrow that shoulder would be purple as a bunch of grapes.

  He thumbed the hammer back and peered down the barrel. Earlier he had aimed at a bottle, squeezed the trigger, watched the hammer fall—and the gun had failed to shoot. One second had passed. Then another. When he lifted his head, the verfluchta thing chose just that moment to go off, the wooden stock slugging him in the jaw so that his teeth clashed and he saw stars. No idea where the ball had flown.

  The rifle’s sights wavered past the black bull’s-eye, danced across gray-clad knees. Gideon lowered the gun. “I can’t do this!”

  “Yes! You! Can!”

  He sighed and raised the weapon again. One didn’t shoot a rifle the same way that one fired a shotgun. The rifle was concentration and precision; the shotgun was fluidity and grace. Judge Biddle always said that the two skills didn’t mix—you couldn’t be a good shotgun shot and a good rifle shot both. Gideon figured he wasn’t any great shakes at either.

  He remembered something else the judge had told him. He had quoted some learned man, a lawyer or maybe another judge, saying: “The law is a gun, which if it misses a pigeon kills a crow; if it does not strike the guilty, it hits someone else. As every crime creates a law, so in turn does every law create a crime.”

  The idea of a law creating a crime didn’t sit well with Gideon, who believed that laws were drafted by wise and sober men to prevent crimes by spelling out what people shouldn’t do. Such as shooting a .50 caliber ball at a target held by some dummkopp a good sixty yards off.

  Was Alonzo a pigeon or a crow?

  And who was the real dummkopp? If he jerked the trigger instead of squeezing it, if there was another hangfire and the ball somehow went astray and hit Alonzo, killed him—manslaughter. Gideon imagined the state’s attorney Alvin Fish—the Cold Fish—prosecuting him with vigor for such an offense.

  “Go ahead and shoot!” Alonzo yelled.

  Gideon took a deep breath. He let out half of it. He steadied the rifle so that the bull’s-eye nestled on top of the gun’s sights. He tightened his finger, felt the trigger’s slight creep. Then the hammer fell, flint struck frizzen, smoke gouted from the barrel and spurted from the touch hole as the gun went CRACK and bucked back into his shoulder.

  He lowered the rifle. Peered through thinning smoke. Up came Alonzo in his labored trot, grinning like the butcher’s dog. He held up the board. “Right on the mark! By gee, you could win a turkey shoot!”

  ***

  The road led through brush growing thick above blackened ground. A stand of forest had been logged off here within the last few years to make charcoal for the ironworks; once the colliers had moved on, someone had set the patch on fire so the huckleberries would grow.

  “When we get back, you can clean these rifles,” Gideon said. Alonzo loved fiddling with guns, scrubbing out their bores after shooting, dressing their moving parts with whale oil, coating their barrels with rendered sheep fat or wax.

  “Been holding my water all morning,” Alonzo announced from atop his tall gelding. “I’ll mix some hot piss in with the water, so I will. You can’t beat it for cleaning burnt powder out of a gun barrel.”

  They passed a shallow pit where men chinked with picks at an ore bank. Other men shoveled the broken rock into baskets, then carried them to a wagon and dumped them in the bed. Gideon and Alonzo overtook a laden wagon on the road. The teamster sat astride the left-side mule closest to the wagon. He called out “Whoa,” pulled back on the reins, and the six-mule team walked to a halt.

  The teamster’s head was level with Alonzo’s. Seated on his little mare, Gideon had to look up.

  “Heard you’uns banging away,” the teamster said. His cheek bulged with a quid. “One of your balls flew over my head.”

  The hangfire. “I hope no harm was done,” Gideon said quickly.

  The teamster squirted tobacco juice onto the road. “No harm, Dutchman. Woke these mules up, so it did.”

  “This here is Sheriff Stoltz,” Alonzo said. “And you are likely aware that I am his deputy.”

  “I am aware, ’Lonzo
Bell, that you are a windbag who couldn’t find his own ass with both hands and a coon dog.”

  “The sheriff is perfecting his marksmanship,” Alonzo said, ignoring the teamster’s gibe. “At first he couldn’t hit a target even if it was as broad across as your wife’s bee-hind. Now I believe he could take the head offen a squirrel at fifty paces.”

  “That’d be good shooting,” the teamster said. “But it would ruin the best part.”

  Gideon’s stomach gave a jump. More than once Alonzo had tried to talk him into eating what he called “a mess of brains”: fried squirrel brains, considered a delicacy in these parts. Cook the heads in lard, crack them open with a knife, and feast on what was inside. The thought nearly made him gag. It must have shown on his face, because the teamster barked a laugh.

  “So you figure on making a frontiersman out of this tadpole?” the man said.

  Gideon flushed. Even though he held a position of authority, he was not much respected in Colerain County. Too young, for one thing. And people called him the Dutch Sheriff. They sniggered at the way he got his V’s and W’s mixed up, and his sentences all backward. Like the time he was digging in the garden and shucked off his muddy breeches before coming in the house, and called out to True, “Honey, throw me down the stairs my other pants.” She laughed so hard she almost wept.

  Two years ago he had gotten on his mare, Maude, and ridden her west to this remote backwoods place. He had left his childhood home in Lancaster County to get away from his grim, narrow-minded dawdy, who drove him like another beast of burden. And, if he was honest with himself, to get away from what had happened to his memmi. Though maybe that hadn’t worked so well. Maybe you could never get away from something like that.

  In Adamant, he got hired as a deputy. He did well at it, even solved a crime on his own by arresting a ne’er-do-well who was stealing items out of barns and sheds and reselling them to a peddler who took them elsewhere and sold them again. Then, just last year, Sheriff Payton had fallen dead with a stroke of apoplexy while walking in the jailhouse door, and the county commissioners appointed Gideon Stoltz, only twenty-one years old at the time, a stranger and a Dutchman to boot, as the new sheriff.

  “… devil of a thing,” the teamster was saying, “I mean, him bein’ a judge and all, and what does he do? Goes and shoots himself with that fancy shotgun.”

  Devil of a thing indeed, Gideon thought. And now that shotgun is mine.

  They bade the teamster goodbye and rode on. The valley lay before them. On the long, parallel mountains hemming in the vale, and between the farms scattered through it, stood the forest. The trees were straight and tall, green pines and darker green hemlocks, towering chestnuts and oaks and maples and beeches whose leaves showed tints of yellow and red and bronze. A flock of pigeons crossed the bright blue sky, black specks flowing southward in an undulating stream of life, a flock for which no beginning could be glimpsed, nor an end.

  They came back to Adamant. “Let’s go up on Burying Hill,” Alonzo said.

  The horses huffed as they climbed the steep track. On top, the riders walked their mounts past slate and sandstone markers. Past a newly dug hole where Hiram Biddle’s corpse would soon go to rest.

  Gideon looked out over the town. The courthouse’s copper roof dazzled. On a hill opposite it stood the academy, a three-story building whose peaked roof bristled with chimneys. On the Diamond, where Franklin and High Streets met, white sheep and red cows grazed. Along Franklin stood a dozen fine houses, brick and stone, Judge Biddle’s among them. Smaller log and frame houses, including Gideon’s, dotted the lesser streets of the town. He found his cottage, a speck of brown—it looked tiny, insignificant, yet he knew it to be full of peace and love; he thought of True, and of little David.

  His gaze shifted to the big spring around which the town had grown. From the spring issued a stream of water that ran off toward the east. Farther along, Spring Creek had been dammed in several places, its flow harnessed for a gristmill, a sawmill, a slitting mill for making nail rods. On the far side of the creek lay Hammertown—another of those tough English words, which Gideon invariably pronounced Hemmertawn. And a tough place it could be. In Adamant proper, you bought your meat and tinware and flannels and flour and got your boots cobbled and your chin shaved, and when you worked up a thirst or had a base urge you went downhill, crossed the covered bridge (a sign said WALK YOUR HORSE OR GET A 2 DOLLAR FINE), and sought out the saloons in Hammertown. Loose women there. Bad whiskey. Fights, like the one that had landed Henry Peebles, eye-gouger and thumb-biter, in jail.

  Spring Creek cut through a gap in the hills to join larger Panther Creek. There in the far offing Gideon could just see the ironworks with its furnace and forge, its mills and barns and pale dots of workers’ cabins, a thin veil of smoke hanging over it all.

  “Let me show you something,” Alonzo said.

  Gideon expected his deputy to dig a pamphlet out of his pocket condemning the Whigs, or extolling the Old Hero and current president, Andrew Jackson—or an advertisement for a new firearm manufactured on the percussion-cap system, which should be purchased for the armory; it seemed Alonzo agitated in favor of this modernization at least twice a day. Now, however, Alonzo did not appear intent on discussing firearms or politics. He drew a thick leg over his gelding’s back and came off like a slide of ore, the horse bracing patiently as his rider clumped to the ground.

  Alonzo rubbed his chin and looked around. “There’s a grave somewhere around here.”

  Gideon dismounted and put the reins over Maude’s head so she could graze among the tombstones.

  Alonzo’s chin needed a shave. He had a paunch and an ample rear end that he referred to as his “back porch.” His big jaw and heavy brow made him look dull. But he was smart and resourceful, and Gideon often thought that Alonzo Bell would make the better sheriff, though it didn’t seem his deputy had ambitions in that direction.

  Alonzo set off toward the far end of the graveyard, Gideon following. Grass gave way to goldenrod and hawkweed.

  Alonzo tramped down some weeds, exposing a small gray marker dappled with lichens and standing slightly off plumb: REV THOS MCEWAN 1752–1805.

  Alonzo squatted and looked at the stone. “McEwan preached over to Panther,” he said. “Ought five. I was pretty young, and Ma wouldn’t let me watch them hang him. So I run off into the forest and didn’t come back till after dark, which that put her in quite a tizzy, figuring I had run away or met with some evil end.”

  “This man was hanged?” Gideon said.

  Alonzo nodded. “The reverend here killed a man. The first murder in the county, if you don’t count rubbing out a few score of Indians.”

  “Who did the preacher kill?”

  “Fellow name of Nat Thompson. The ironmaster’s brother.”

  “Why?”

  “They got in a fight. After the preacher brained Nat, he tried to hide the corpus by burying it in his own garden, imagine that. Why do murderers always want to bury a corpus? There are better ways of disposing of someone you have killed. Cut the body up, leave the parts in the woods, and let the wolves and bears eat up the evidence. But no, they always want to bury it, usually near where the deed was done.”

  “Someone found the victim’s body?”

  “The sheriff did. When it went to trial, the preacher confessed. They took him to the gallows tree and put a noose around his neck.”

  Gideon’s gaze shifted downhill to the white oak spreading its brawny limbs beside the courthouse. In autumn, pigeons sometimes roosted in the great tree; people went there at night with catchpoles and killed bushels of them. The old oak would no longer be used for hangings, however: the state legislature had just passed a law specifying that all executions would take place in the walled yard behind each county’s jail.

  Alonzo straightened with a grunt, his knees popping like gunshots. “Folks say Judge Biddle was never the same after he sentenced the reverend to hang.”

  Your joys on earth will
soon be gone,

  Your flesh in dust be laid

  Five

  Dig it deeper.

  He listened to the uncanny words: like an urgent whisper by a voice old and hoarse.

  Dig it deeper.

  Trying to locate the source of the sound, Gideon looked up. Against the gray sky, the bare black branches of two trees scraped together.

  Yesterday he had stood in the sunshine here on Burying Hill while Alonzo showed him the grave of the preacher that Judge Biddle had sentenced to hang thirty years ago. Now the judge would go into the same ground as the man he had condemned.

  Crows flapping overhead cast wary glances at the figures below, then let out scathing caws. The wind picked up, and the trees’ limbs began chattering in a tongue Gideon didn’t understand.

  The mayor, Osgood Jolly, read from the Book of Common Prayer—something he had been loath to do, telling Gideon, “I don’t care if he was a judge, the service is not to be used for any ‘who have laid violent hands upon themselves.’ Says so right here.” Jolly had pecked his fat finger against the book’s page. Gideon had replied, “It was the judge’s wish that the service be read. He wrote it in his will.” The mayor frowned and shook his head. Gideon had declared, “I will read it then,” not wanting the task, what with his accent thick as nudelsupp, but figuring, correctly as it turned out, that Jolly would not wish to give up his authority.

  The mayoral voice intoned: “Man, that is born of woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.”

  Surely so, thought Gideon, though to temper that misery might come great joy: the love of a woman, the miracle of a child.

  “In the midst of life we are in death …”

  Last night, as he had sat by the coffin in the doctor’s parlor, Gideon had prayed for Hiram Biddle, asking God to take the judge’s soul into heaven. He had also spent time thinking back over the last day of Hiram Biddle’s life, a day when he and the judge had gone hunting for grouse in the brushlands outside of town.