A Stranger Here Below

by Charles Fergus

  One thing he’d remembered clearly from the hunt was an excellent and artful shot the judge had made. A cock grouse had come clattering out of the brush in front of Old Nick, flying low and fast, and Judge Biddle swept up his gun and snapped off a shot: a cloud of russet feathers, and the bird cartwheeled and thumped the ground. Old Nick found it and brought it back. Then, instead of pouching the bird, the judge had stood with his gun resting on his left arm, holding the grouse in his left hand, while with the fingers of his right hand he had spread the grouse’s tail like a fan so that the reddish-brown feathers showed all pretty. The judge had stood there looking at the fanned tail, his head bowed, for a long time. Like he was praying. Or considering. Coming to some decision, maybe. When finally he pouched the bird, Hiram Biddle’s face had looked old and weary and … hopeless, that’s how it had seemed, thought Gideon. Hopeless, and terribly sad.

  And when they’d returned to town, having made plans to go duck hunting before dawn the next morning, Judge Biddle had addressed him as “Gideon.” He couldn’t remember the judge ever using his Christian name before. At first it was the formal, polite “Deputy Stoltz,” and then, after his promotion, “Sheriff Stoltz.” Another odd thing: The judge had given him his take of game, three plump grouse and two woodcock, a nice addition to Gideon’s brace of grouse and a single woodcock. Judge Biddle had never given away his game before.

  “Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts …”

  Gideon decided that only God knew the secrets of Hiram Biddle’s heart.

  “… grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore. Amen.”

  A thin chorus of amens echoed from the gathering. Only a handful of people had come to the burying. The judge’s housekeeper, Mrs. Leathers. Some folks from the courthouse. The editor of the town’s weekly newspaper. And the headmaster of the academy, a white-haired gent dressed in old-fashioned blue pantaloons, a dark blue coat trimmed in red, silver-buckled shoes on his feet, and a tricorn hat on his head.

  The custodian and his helpers took hold of the ropes and lowered the coffin into the ground. Two other men stood waiting. They wore black frock coats with silk facings on the lapels; their hands, gloved in black leather, held stovepipe hats. Fish and Blake. Fish, the state’s attorney, the county prosecutor; Blake was a lawyer, too. The two men set their hats down carefully on nearby slabs, took up shovels, and snicked them into the pile of fresh earth. They cast the dirt into the grave.

  Gideon heard the clods thump hollowly against the judge’s coffin. And all at once the prickling pins-and-needles sensation blossomed across his shoulders and back. The debilitating feeling that had overcome him when he found the judge’s body. The same feeling that had stricken him when he’d been confronted by his memmi, lying dead in the kitchen twelve years ago. His vision swam, and now he heard the dirt drumming down on his mother’s coffin, sealing her away in the earth—forever. She was gone for all time, he would never see her again, never kiss her or feel her hand caressing his cheek or ruffling his hair. He looked across at his sister Joanna holding little Friedrich by the shoulders, Friedrich’s hair all stroobly, their memmi would never have let him go out like that. Friedrich was rutsching around, trying to get loose. Their other sisters, Hannah and Sarah, held onto each other, tears running down their faces. But no one held onto Gideon. Their dawdy stood there like an ox about to have a hammer brought down on his head. Gideon’s uncle, for whom he’d been named, wept and wrung his hands. Many others had come to the burying. Of course, it was something out of the ordinary, something to break the monotony, the routine of farming. He had stared at the men, unable to stop wondering: Did you kill mei memmi? Jacob Reifsnyder, from the next farm over, short and wiry, with a beard almost as red as his neck—was it you? Or maybe you, Sam Wechsler, big doplich Wechsler, you were always laughing and gay when you talked to her, standing there now beside your dried-up skinny frau, leaning your head toward hers and saying something, a half smile on your lips, as if nothing so very dreadful has taken place. His eyes had passed slowly over the other men, one by one. Was it you? Or you? Or you?

  The thudding of dirt ceased. The two lawyers, Fish and Blake, put their shovels aside and brushed off their hands.

  Gideon straightened and tried to relax his shoulders and breathe air into his lungs.

  A movement drew his eye toward the end of the cemetery. There, beyond the last scattered markers and the sere grass and weeds, stood a horse. A horse like a vision. A beautiful horse, tall and black. Even on this dull day, its coat glistened. The horse had a deep chest and sloping muscular shoulders and an arched neck; it stood perfectly balanced on its long legs. Ein hengshd: a stallion. It had to be. He drank in the horse’s beauty, used it to anchor his mind in the present.

  A man stood by the stallion, holding the reins. The man wore a brown workaday coat and had kept his hat on his head. Beneath the broad brim, Gideon recognized the face of Adonijah Thompson, owner of the Panther Ironworks. Gideon had never met the ironmaster, although he had seen him from time to time in town. The black stallion must be the one called Vagabond. Everyone in the county was talking about the horse, how fast and fiery and potent he was, and many had put their mares to him.

  The ironmaster placed a black-booted foot in the near stirrup and swung up into the saddle. He sat there, tall and erect, staring at the people gathered around Hiram Biddle’s grave. Then he turned the stallion aside. A lane intersected with the burying ground and the stallion strode onto it, taking long fluid steps, heading off beneath the trees. The ironmaster didn’t look back.

  ***

  Walking down Burying Hill, Gideon fell in with Fish and Blake. Fish was gaunt and somewhat stooped. Blake had a big bearish head and tended to mumble through a ginger-colored beard.

  “A sad day,” Gideon offered.

  The Cold Fish looked resolutely ahead. “Felo-de-se is always hard to accept.”

  Gideon didn’t know the Latin words but assumed they referred to suicide.

  “This is not a backwoods settlement any longer,” Blake said. “Adamant is an up-and-coming town. For such a prominent figure to take his own life …” He shook his head.

  “It will be in newspapers all over the state,” Fish muttered. “It’s unseemly, that’s what it is.”

  “It wonders me,” Gideon said—he winced at the Dutch usage and started over again. “I am … astonished that Judge Biddle would do this. The day he killed himself, he and I went …”—he caught himself before the pronunciation haunting slipped out—“… hunting for grouse.”

  Fish gave a dismissive shrug. He lengthened his stride, and Blake followed suit.

  Gideon walked faster to stay with them. “It seemed to me that Judge Biddle was not on that day his usual self. He seemed, I suppose you would say, troubled.”

  Fish shook his head. “What’s done is done.”

  “The other day in court he was quite himself,” Blake mumbled.

  “A keen sense of justice,” Fish said. “Knew the law inside out, and never applied it out of rancor or for personal gain.”

  “Vigilant,” Blake added. “Could never sneak anything past him.”

  “And now the black ox has trampled him,” Fish said.

  The lawyers increased the pace of their downhill march again.

  Staring at the lawyers’ backs, Gideon felt like a child tagging along behind his elders. He had worked with Fish to investigate several crimes, including the theft of those small items from barns and sheds, and, more recently, a case in which a husband used a rod to beat his wife bloody, and the affray down in Hammertown during which Henry Peebles injured those two men. Fish had treated Gideon like some tool to be used and then set aside. Now people were saying that Fish would be the new judge.

  They reached the streets of Adamant. People went in and out of stores. A boy wearing a leather apron dashed past. A man pushed a handcart filled with packages.

  They go on with lif
e as if nothing has happened, Gideon thought. It had been the same when his mother was killed.

  He took several long strides, stepped in front of the lawyers, and turned to face them. They had to stop or run into him.

  “Mr. Fish, Mr. Blake. Both of you have known Judge Biddle for years. Is there anything in his past that could have made him decide to kill himself?”

  Blake looked off to the side and murmured, “In this world ye shall have tribulations.”

  Fish stepped around Gideon as if the sheriff were a pile of horse manure that a man wouldn’t wish to dirty his boots in.

  Blake touched his hat brim while brushing past on the other side.

  Black hats bobbing, Fish and Blake continued down Lawyers Row. They climbed identical sets of limestone steps and let themselves into their offices.

  ***

  The hotel worker, Raines, was out behind the big brick lodging house scrubbing out a spittoon. A wooden bucket filled with soapy water sat next to another half-dozen of the ornate brass vessels yet to be cleaned. Raines went to the same church that Gideon and True attended.

  “Hello, Mr. Raines,” Gideon said.

  Raines looked up. When he saw who it was, his stare became as hard and unfriendly as the ones he and his friend Bevins had directed at Gideon after the judge’s suicide was announced during Wednesday evening’s hymn singing at church. Those stares had aroused Gideon’s suspicion at the time. “I wonder if you would mind answering a question or two,” he said.

  Raines’s unfriendly stare became downright hostile.

  “The other night in church. When they said that the judge had killed himself, you and Mr. Bevins put your heads together and whispered to each other. Then you both turned and looked at me.”

  “Well, what of it?”

  “Do you know something about the judge’s death? About why he killed himself?”

  Raines squinted. “Why in the blazes would I know anything about that?”

  “I don’t know, I just wondered.”

  “Course not. Me and the judge, we weren’t exactly bosom friends.”

  “You disliked the judge for some reason?”

  “What?” Raines looked baffled. “I ain’t saying that at all. I am just telling you I wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with no judge. Not like him and me drank whiskey together, or went out traipsing around the countryside hunting little birdies.”

  Gideon felt his face redden. “Then why did you and Bevins look like you knew something? Why did you stare at me like that?”

  Raines sniffed. “The reason we looked at you? Because we wonder why you are the sheriff.” He lifted his chin. “You are barely breeched. You’re a stranger. You don’t come from around here. And every time you open your mouth, you advertise yourself as a dumb Dutchman.” His voice was full of scorn. “Sheriff Payton, he was all right, too bad he had to die. But why should they go and make you the sheriff over us all?”

  Gideon was nonplussed. And embarrassed for being dense enough to think that this man and his friend might have any particular knowledge that could shed light on Hiram Biddle’s death.

  “Mark my words, come the next election, you’ll get voted out,” Raines said. “You think we want a Dutchman wearing a badge, struttin’ around with his thumbs tucked in his vest, lording it over us? I think not. No, sir. This ain’t your county. Adamant ain’t your town.”

  “Sorry to have bothered you,” Gideon said.

  Broad is the road that leads to death

  And thousands walk together there

  Six

  After church on Sunday, Gideon hitched the bay gelding Jack to the wagon that Judge Biddle had willed to him. He helped True up onto the seat, then handed little David up to her. They drove out of Adamant on the road to Panther. Gideon let Jack walk; the three-mile trip would take slightly under an hour. True sat next to Gideon, holding David in her lap. She smiled at her husband. “Remember the day we went and found that preacher?”

  “How could I forget?” Gideon grinned. “You rode my mare, and I walked along beside, and I was the happiest man in the world.” He added, “Now I’m even happier.”

  “I’m happy, too, Gid.” She looked down at the sleeping baby. “God has truly blessed us.”

  It still wondered him, how he’d met this wonderful woman at a frolic in Panther, where they would soon be visiting True’s kin—which, if he admitted it to himself, was not exactly something he looked forward to. At the frolic, True had caught his eye from across the hall. They seemed to swim toward one another through the crowd of bodies, the young people all chattering and smoking and drinking and laughing and dancing, and came together. They couldn’t hear one another very well over the blaring voices and the caterwauling fiddle, so they put their heads close together. He felt her breath on his ear when she said her name and asked his. Then she smiled and put her arm through his and they went outside. They strolled in the semi-darkness, in the orange and faintly pulsating glow cast by the iron furnace. True told him she worked in the mansion just across the way, helping to take care of the ironmaster’s house. Gideon said he had just gotten a job as a deputy sheriff in Adamant. “So you are a lawman,” the girl said in a teasing tone. In the company of this lively young woman—wunnershee, such a beautiful girl!—he felt like he was soaring. His hip grazed hers, and he felt a fire run up his side and spread throughout his body. When they parted, she gave him a kiss on the cheek, pulled back a little, and smiled as her eyes lingered on his. They agreed to meet again, at a revival meeting on the following Friday night.

  At the revival they paid no attention to the preacher on the stage shouting and gesticulating and writhing as he proclaimed the imminent second coming of Christ, nor the people weeping and prostrating themselves and crying out “Amen!” in the flickering light of torches. Instead, they went off into the woods together. The next morning they found the preacher again. He was just finishing shaving over a basin outside the open flaps of a tent. He looked tired and rumpled, and his eyes were bleary. Before he would marry them he made Gideon cough up a half-dollar and told them to lay their hands on his Bible and promise to go to church regularly and worship the Lord and turn aside from Satan and his conjurings and temptations, and then he tied the knot. Afterward, Gideon had boosted True up onto Maude and led her back to the house he was renting. They loved each other heedlessly for two days.

  The following Sunday, when finally they had gone to her family’s cabin at the ironworks, they found her brothers seated at a table with their father at the head; Gideon figured they were plotting what they’d do when they got hold of him. True stalked into the room with him in tow, shy and fearful. Her father banged his hands on the table, jumped up, and lunged at him, bellowing, “You god-damned bastard!” Gideon was taller than Davey Burns; at a shade over six feet, he was taller than most men, and years of farm work had made him strong. Still, he ducked back from the barrel-chested man pushing toward him. It turned out he didn’t have to fight. True jumped in between them, stuck her face up into her father’s and said in a tone no less belligerent than his: “We are lawfully married! I picked him out. I will bear his children. Your grandchildren.”

  Gideon thought about that—being picked out. When all along he thought he’d done the picking.

  Now he drove the wagon carrying himself, his wife, and their child, on the way to that cabin in Panther where he knew he was still resented. As he drove the bay gelding, he looked off to the side of the road where Spring Creek went gliding along in its bed. Tan leaves spun down from dapple-trunked sycamores and lit on the water and went floating along in the current like a fleet of tiny boats. Uphill from the road, the trees had all been logged off for charcoal to power the blast that melted the ore, the crucial step in making iron. The trees’ stumps and root systems had sent up thousands of new shoots, a jungle of brush that was lush green in summer, flecked now with autumn’s colors. Brambles curved up among rotting limbs that the coalers had left behind. Rain had cut into the ground, rivulets carrie
d the soil away. To Gideon, the hills looked deeply wounded; to True, he figured, it was the way they had always been.

  “This Jack is a good wagon horse,” Gideon said. “He’s calm and strong. Now that we have a wagon, all of us can ride in style whenever we visit your kin.”

  “A plain old wagon,” True teased. “What kind of style is that? If only Judge Biddle had willed you his phaeton.” She laughed. “It was kind of him to give you his horse and rig. And the dog and gun. Imagine, him thinking of you in the midst of whatever it was that tormented him so.”

  “There’s a Dutch word, faschtwarre,” Gideon said. “Puzzled, it means. That’s how I feel about the judge shooting himself. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It’s hard, losing a friend. I think about my cousin all the time.” The previous autumn, that unfortunate young woman had been stirring apple butter in a kettle over an open fire when her skirts caught flame; burned severely, she died the next day.

  “Death is all around us,” True murmured. “We’d best be ready—ready to go home to the Lord.”

  Gideon thought of a line from one of the shape-note hymns they sang in church: My soul should stretch her wings in haste, Fly fearless through death’s iron gate. He wasn’t sure about that, longing for death, with the ascension to heaven the reward at the end of what might have been a bitter, painful life—or one cut cruelly short. Having that thought made him wonder if his faith was sound. Because he was plagued with doubts. It had been that way ever since he’d found his memmi … True was right, one had to be ready. Death might steal in with the diphtheria or the yellow jack, or come crashing down on a lightning bolt, or arrive pell-mell in a cutter pulled by a runaway horse. It might take you in its embrace when you opened the door to someone with rape on his mind and murder in his heart.

  David remained asleep in True’s arms, a bonnet shading his face. If only he could have shown this little one to his memmi. But if she hadn’t been killed, would he ever have left his home? Would he have journeyed west, and met True, and had this child with her?