Before I deliver’d my ruling, I saw the ironmaster glance scornfully at Robt. Wheeler. As I spake the words “It is the verdict of this Court,” his face assumed that peculiar inverted smile he often displays; seeming to believe, I must assume, that I would find in his favor. However, I found for Wheeler, there being no need to hurry the matter, & the integrity of the board of inquiry having been brought into question.
What a stench in the land, were it to be bruited about that I had been influenced by the offer of a fine grey horse! Upon hearing the verdict, the ironmaster stared straight ahead, his face a frozen mask. Leaving the courtroom, he announced to Wheeler, in a manner calculated to be overheard, “You may hold on to that farm for the time being. But do not expect to sell your crops to the ironworks, nor grind your corn at my mill.”
Gideon sat back in the chair. So the enmity between the judge and the ironmaster did have its beginnings in court. This must have been the case that Davey Burns mentioned when Gideon and True and David visited her family in Panther this Sunday past.
He scanned the rest of the 1804 entries and found nothing notable. He got out the volume for 1805. Its top edge was not dusty, as the journals for the three previous years had been. Nor did its spine crackle when he opened the book.
He paged through the better part of a year’s worth of mundane entries—the depth of snow at Easter, a harvest of sponge mushrooms found under elm trees in May, a pianoforte concert, the death of a judge in a neighboring county “who is now as but a clod of the valley”—until an exclamatory sentence stopped him.
Sept. 4. The Lord has blest me! It being Saturday, I determin’d to ramble in the woods near the iron plantation. On my way I passed the Presbyterian church & parsonage, where, engaged in weeding a flower bed, was a young woman. She straightened as I came up, & I stopped & removed my hat. Tho’ a bonnet shaded her face, I could see she was exceedingly beautiful, with dark hair, eyes lively & bright, & a countenance that bespoke an active mind within. She proved well spoken, neither immodest nor reserved but open & intelligent in her speech. As we conversed, she blest me with a smile, which called up in my bosom emotions most pleasurable. I confess I stammered, & lost my train of thought, something which never occurs in court! A man came out of the parsonage, tall & robust, with reddish hair & a florid complexion. He was the pastor, Thomas McEwan; she, his daughter Rachel.
Gideon stared at the page. He was both charmed by the judge’s description of his meeting this beautiful young woman—and haunted by the knowledge that this was the opening scene of a terrible tragedy. Not one of these people had any idea of what must happen in the coming months: that the preacher would commit murder and go to the gallows; that the daughter would lose her father and leave Adamant forever; that the judge would have his hopes shattered and his life misdirected onto a sad and lonely path.
Sept. 5. The Rev. Tolliver is close friends with the Rev. McEwan despite that they cleave to different denominations. My pastor describes his colleague as “a Presbyterian of the old school,” & speaks glowingly of Rachel, saying she is devoted to her father. Her mother died some years ago, so Rachel cooks & manages the household. She is thrifty, & possessed of good sense. The Rev. T. suggests it would be entirely proper for me to attend church at Panther on Sunday next; he smiled, & patted me on the shoulder, then hinted that Rachel might welcome the advances of a judge, “a pillar in the community & a marriageable man who could provide her a fine home.” I felt no small degree of embarrassment at how quickly this Episcopal divine had divined my interest & intent in this matter.
Gideon smiled at the judge’s pun. He missed his friend. In the next week’s entries a lovesick young man mooned over the woman he had recently met.
Sept. 12. Arr. in Panther before service & took a seat in back. Rachel sitting in the front row. Her father read from the Book of Ruth, & based his sermon on the words Ruth spake to Naomi: “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee. For whither thou goest, I will go: and where thou lodgest, I will lodge also.” He spoke with surpassing eloquence, his message being about faith, love, & steadfastness. I thought it a most propitious subject, & noted that he directed what I could only interpret as a welcoming gaze toward me several times during his discourse. After the service, the Rev. stood by the door greeting the congregation. He shook my hand with warmth & vigor, & asked if I might repair to the parsonage to partake in the noon meal; which invitation I accepted with no little alacrity! As I stood in the yard, looked back & saw the ironmaster, Ad. Thompson, whom I had not noticed in church. He shook hands I think rather perfunctorily with the Rev., then turned and strode away.
Enjoyed a sumptuous dinner that Rachel prepared, 2 kinds of meat & 3 vegetables followed by apple pie. I scarcely tasted the food, so entranced was I to be in her presence. After the meal I convers’d at length w. the Rev. McEwan concerning the Expedition of Discovery commanded by Capts. Lewis & Clark that has been sent forth into the Louisiana Purchase. He told me in great detail about papers & articles he has read describing mineral, botanical, & zoological specimens that the explorers have sent back, including a “prairie dog,” not a canine at all but a fossorial rodent, which Pres. Jefferson rec’d alive in a box. The preacher then changed subjects abruptly, speaking of the war in Europe & the effrontery of the tyrant Napoleon declaring himself Emperor of France. The Rev. described Bonaparte as “a beast who has murdered countless civilians” & “a perfect demon in league with Satan.” His face grew livid & he began to rant; but Rachel calmed him with a soothing hand on his arm & a whisper in his ear. Sitting down, she gave me a smile that caused such a pleasant emotion in my breast that I felt I “walked in climes of bliss.”
Gideon looked up. The knocker on the front door of the judge’s house was banging. He heard the door open, the sound of voices, then heavy footfalls coming down the hallway.
Alonzo burst in to the study. “You must come at once!”
If this be death, I soon shall be
From ev’ry pain and sorrow free
Thirteen
“Hammertown,” Alonzo gasped as they ran down the street. “The Guinea Hen. Doc oughta be there now … Face looks like a horse kicked it.”
He came to a wheezing, bent-over stop and waved Gideon ahead. Gideon put on a burst of speed.
The man lay on a table in a back room of the saloon. A folded coat pillowed his head. Beneath a blanket the man’s chest slowly rose and fell. Dr. Beecham, normally placid and friendly, gave Gideon a glare as if he were the cause of this trouble. The doctor held the man’s wrist in one hand while taking his pulse with his other hand. The man’s face was turned away from the door.
“Pulse is weak and irregular.” Beecham motioned Gideon around the table.
When he got a look, Gideon sucked in his breath.
The man’s eyes had vanished beneath a blackened, grotesquely swollen brow. Bloody saliva roped down from his lips.
“They found him half an hour ago,” the doctor said. “Must’ve laid in that alley last night and all of today. It’s a wonder he didn’t die of exposure.”
“Does anyone know who he is?”
“I doubt his own mother would recognize him.” Beecham felt carefully over the man’s skull with his fingertips. His fingers stopped in one area, then withdrew.
A woman brought a basin of water. The doctor dipped a cloth in the water and touched it to the man’s lips. The man did not stir. The doctor cleaned caked blood off lips, cheeks, and chin. The water in the basin turned pink. The doctor parted the shredded lips and began cleaning out the man’s mouth. Teeth fell clinking against the basin’s edge.
Beecham said he would have the man taken to his house. Alonzo, who by now had arrived at the saloon, found four men to help. Beecham directed them to carefully slide the patient onto a second blanket. “Try not to jar him,” he said. Three men to a side, they carried him from the room. Gideon gripped the blanket tightly. The doctor reached in between him and the next man and steadied the victim�
��s head.
Outside, it was almost night. A voice whooped from another tavern. A fiddle sawed out a tune. Revelers sang a drinking song. Gideon and the others bore the unconscious man across the bridge and up the hill. At the doctor’s house they eased him onto a bed.
Beecham turned to Gideon. His ruddy face was solemn. “Along with the contusions and a broken cheekbone—maybe two broken cheekbones—he has a depressed skull fracture. With an injury like that, if a person don’t revive within a few hours …” He lifted his shoulders, let them fall.
Gideon picked up one of the man’s hands, then the other. They were limp. Clean, the nails well kept, the knuckles undamaged: the man must not have had a chance to use his fists in defense. He wore a white shirt, flecked with dried blood, and trousers held up with suspenders that had slipped off his shoulders. His pockets were turned inside out. Gideon smelled the bite of urine on the trousers, along with something that tickled his nose. He shook one of the pocket linings above his cupped hand. Flecks of pale sawdust drifted onto his palm.
“Alonzo,” he said, “please go and check at the boardinghouses. Ask if anyone didn’t sleep last night in his room or didn’t show up for breakfast this morning. Someone who works in carpentry, or maybe at the sawmill.”
The doctor told Gideon that the man had been found by a boy, who followed his dog, which apparently followed its nose. The man lay beneath a heap of trash, covered over with boards.
Gideon stated the obvious: “Left for dead.”
Beecham sat down in a chair. “With that skull fracture, I doubt he’ll make it.”
“Can you operate?”
The doctor grimaced. “It’s difficult surgery. I don’t have the instruments to do it right. Never even seen it done.”
“Surely there’s something …?”
“Maybe you fancy yourself a surgeon, sheriff?”
“I didn’t mean to criticize.”
The doctor sighed. “All we can do is wait.”
***
Gideon met Alonzo at the jail.
“It’s likely a fellow staying at Shaw’s,” Alonzo informed him. “Name of Yost Kepler. Works at Latimer’s. His landlord hasn’t seen him since supper yesterday.”
They took the man’s jacket to the boardinghouse. Boston and Luella Shaw both nodded when they looked at the jacket. Lighting the way with a candle, Mr. Shaw led them up the stairs. The room was in an attic under the roof’s slant, a cramped place with one small window in the gable end. Gideon figured it would be hellishly hot in summer and miserably cold in winter. A few items of clothing hung from nails driven into the wall. On a small table next to the bed lay a razor rolled up in a towel, a deck of playing cards, and a stack of letters addressed to Yost Kepler, General Delivery, Adamant, Pennsylvania. The return address was a place called Womelsdorf, Near Reading, the latter being a sizable town in Berks County north of Gideon’s old home.
“What can you tell me about him?” Gideon asked the Shaws.
“He’s been with us since April,” Boston Shaw said. “A pleasant enough fellow. Pays his rent on time, keeps his room tidy, and talks polite at the table.”
“He works at the sawmill?”
“He clerks. Sometimes he’s in the yard, stacking boards and such. Been there since he came to town.”
“Does he have any friends?
“I don’t know anybody who didn’t like him, because, like I said, Yost is a pleasant fellow.”
“Close friends, among the other boarders?”
“I wouldn’t say any in particular. No enemies, neither.”
“Does he drink, go out to saloons?”
“Sometimes he will go out of an evening,” Shaw said.
The name Yost Kepler was clearly German. Gideon asked, “How is his English?”
“You can tell he’s Dutch. But it don’t get in the way,” Shaw said. Then added with a sheepish smile, “Kind of like yourself, Sheriff.”
“What about his family?”
“The ones who write to him? Sometimes he spoke of his parents. An older brother is taking over their farm. Yost being one of the young ’uns, why, he had to make his own way. He talked now and then about traveling, heading west. Illinois, or some such place. Mentioned he might join the army. But first he wanted to work for a while, save some money.”
“Does he ask you to hold his wages, or does he deposit them in the bank?”
Shaw shook his head. “He never asked me to hold money for him.” He added, “He has a nice gold-plated watch that he likes to get out of his pocket; it has his initials inside the lid.”
There had been no watch in Yost Kepler’s pocket when Gideon inspected the unconscious man earlier.
Gideon looked under the thin straw-filled mattress and in the pockets of the clothes hanging on the wall, but did not find the watch or anything else. There was no other obvious place in the room where a person might hide cash or valuables.
Gideon picked up the letters. “I will take these,” he said.
***
In Hammertown Alonzo showed him where Kepler had been found. The lantern cast long shadows on the rubbish, from which issued a sharp, sudden rustling.
Alonzo leaped back. “Snake or rat, I want nothing to do with you!”
“He was covered up with these boards?” Gideon said.
“So we are told.”
Gideon peered about. Two roughly parallel lines, mostly effaced by others’ footprints, led in to the alley from the street about ten paces away. He followed those drag marks—made by the victim’s bootheels, he figured—to where they vanished in the general scuffed-over environment of the street. The alley itself was too littered and the lantern too weak for anything else to be revealed.
“Let’s come back tomorrow,” he said.
A few squat candles lit the interior of the Guinea Hen. Shavings lay on the plank floor. Bare spots were tacky with spilled beer. Three men seated at a table turned and stared, a drinking bowl between them, tobacco smoke clouded above.
“Too bad, that boy gettin’ his head bashed in,” the saloonkeeper said. He was stooped over, with an upper lip like a parrot’s beak and a patch of white off-center in his black hair as if he’d bumped into a flour sack. “He going to die?”
Gideon thought, We are all going to die. Then he said, “The man’s name is Yost Kepler. He works at Latimer’s Sawmill. Do you know him?”
The saloonkeeper pushed out his lower lip. “That would be a Dutch moniker, wouldn’t it?”
“I would say yes.”
“There’s a Dutch boy comes in here now and again. Though I don’t recall seeing him last night.”
Gideon talked to a serving woman and got the same story.
They moved on to the next block. A saloon called The Horse was the only establishment in Hammertown that agreed to serve Negroes—men who worked in the tannery or the livery or drove wagons. No one in that place, keeper or customers, had any notion or recall of Yost Kepler.
They entered a door beneath a sign showing a crudely painted crown atop a whiskey jug and the name HOUSE OF LORDS. The proprietor had small close-set eyes and a broad gash of a mouth. Stingy with his words. Finally Gideon pried out of him that a Dutch boy from the sawmill sometimes wet his whistle there.
“Did he come in last night?”
Using both hands, the saloonkeeper pushed back his mop of greasy hair. He gestured with his chin. “Ask her.”
The waitress was tall, chubby, and fair-haired. She wore a stained apron over a frayed dress. “I know who you mean,” she said. “Yost.” She said the name slowly, as if trying it out. “Set over there last evening.” She indicated a table.
“Did he drink much?”
“His friend kept filling his glass.”
“What were they drinking?”
“Mule. Our best.”
Gideon knew that the best mule-kick this establishment offered was the local rye whiskey diluted with water and beefed up again with tobacco juice and burnt sugar.
“This friend, was he someone you recognized?”
“Never saw him before in my life.”
“What did he look like?”
She scratched at the corner of her mouth. “Medium size, neither short nor tall. His face was plain as buttered bread. Clean-shaven. ’Bout the same age as the Dutch boy, twenty or so. Talkative, a regular blatherskite.” She frowned. “Cheap, too. The whoreson didn’t leave a tip.” She held a wooden serving platter against her chest. “I recall he was wearing a vest. Very fancy it was. Had a pattern on it, like leaves—no, like pickles. Green pickles. The vest being red.”
“Can you recall anything else?”
“A while back, maybe two weeks ago, I seen the Dutch boy with another fellow—that one was big and ugly, with broad shoulders, strong looking. I think he had dark hair and maybe a pocked face.” She shrugged. “But that’s not who he was with last night.”
“Yost and his friend, the talkative one with the red vest. Did they leave here together?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Did you hear anything that Yost and this fellow said? Any names, or where they were going next?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t hear nothing. Tell me, is that boy going to die?”
“God willing, he won’t die,” Gideon said. Then he considered the goblin’s face Yost Kepler would wear for the rest of his days if he lived.
Our life is ever on the wing,
And death is ever nigh …
Fourteen
The gray blanket looked like a barren hill after winter’s snow had melted away. Gideon wished the blanket did not have to be removed, that it could stay in place, concealing the terrible truth that lay beneath.
Murder had been committed in Adamant.
The doctor lifted the blanket.
The corpse lay stripped and washed. The arms rested along the sides, hands palms up, fingers curling inward, the skin white as church paint. The face with its ruined mouth and brutal brow seemed barely human.
A Stranger Here Below Page 10
