“We’ll know better after the autopsy,” Dr. Beecham said, “but for now I’d say the cause of death is the depressed skull fracture.” He indicated the side of the head near the crown, where he had clipped away blond hair to reveal bruised skin and a sunken area perhaps an inch in diameter.
“What kind of weapon did that?” Gideon said.
“A blunt object. A club, maybe a heavy bottle or a jug? Whatever it was, it barely broke the skin.”
Gideon reached out and touched Yost Kepler’s shoulder. It was cold.
You didn’t deserve this. Your family doesn’t deserve this. Then he blinked and drew back a little, remembering how he himself had used a heavy pistol to club the Tattered Man on the side of the head. Had he fractured the man’s skull? To this day, he didn’t know whether the Tattered Man had lived or died. But Gideon had lashed out at his assailant in self-defense. And he hadn’t gone on beating him and beating him.
Purple yellow-edged bruises covered Kepler’s torso. They reminded Gideon of the jonijumbubs in his mother’s garden—flowers that True called heart’s ease.
There would be no easing the hearts of Yost Kepler’s kin.
“The ribs are broken in a number of places,” the doctor said. “Organ damage? An intriguing question, whose answer will be revealed by a thorough dissection.”
Gideon looked at Beecham. He could almost imagine the doctor rubbing his hands together in anticipation of getting out his scalpel. He turned back to the corpse and focused on the flowerlike bruises. Each had a slightly lopsided but decidedly triangular shape. “I wonder if these were made by a bootheel.”
The doctor peered at them. “Could’ve used their boots on him.”
“Maybe just one boot. If you look close, it appears that one corner of the heel didn’t bruise the skin. They’re all pretty much like that, all those marks.”
With pencil and paper, and using a ruler, Gideon measured and drew an accurate picture of several of the bruises. The doctor stood watching, unshaven and bleary-eyed after having sat with his patient through the night. Kepler had died at five in the morning.
“Why don’t you get some sleep?” Gideon said.
Beecham glanced at the clock in the corner. An expectant, cheerful look came to his face. “Fish will be here soon. You can help, too, you got the stomach for it.”
Gideon thought about what he might gain from watching the doctor open up the corpse and cut out the organs and peer at them. Slice them up, too, probably. And the last thing he wanted to do was to rub elbows with the Cold Fish. “I’ll wait and read your report,” he said. “I have an investigation to see to.”
He found Alonzo leaning against the wall at the entrance to the alley where Kepler had been found.
“A lovely spot,” Alonzo said. “Which I poked around some already.”
The boards used to cover the victim stood propped against the wall. The alley was strewn with broken crates, sodden newspapers, coffee grounds, rotten fruit attended by yellowjackets.
They rooted about in the trash. “Where was he lying?” Gideon asked.
“Over here. His head was up against this crate.”
Gideon got down on his knees—a bit cautiously, with all of the yellowjackets buzzing around. “Look here.” The ground was soft. He pointed at several marks in the dirt. The indentations were triangular, and they lined up behind broader indentations that could have been made by a boot’s sole. Gideon got out the piece of paper on which he had sketched the bruises on Kepler’s torso. “I think that when we find a man wearing a boot with only half a heel, we will have found our murderer.”
They continued sifting through the refuse. Gideon held up a heavy brown-and-tan crock, its handle broken off. “This could have been used to hit him on the head.”
“Could’ve been,” Alonzo said. He commenced whistling, then suddenly stopped and said emphatically, “Sheriff, I think we have looked here long enough. We need to go talk to people. Ask them questions while they may still remember something.” He paused. “If you want my honest opinion.”
Gideon fought down a smile. Alonzo was never reluctant to share his thoughts. After Gideon had been made sheriff, one of the county commissioners pointedly suggested that Alonzo, the brother of the commissioner’s wife, would make an excellent deputy: He could read, and he knew Adamant and Colerain County like the back of his hand. He had been working as a house builder, a job that did not satisfy him. He knew lots of practical things. A bachelor, he could work long hours if needed. Gideon had to admit that Alonzo had proven a good choice. He shaved only sporadically, went weeks without washing his person or his clothes, belched and farted rather too freely, and talked about guns too much. But however quirky Alonzo might be, however dull-appearing and slovenly, he was an observant, perceptive man.
Gideon straightened and brushed his hands off on his trousers. He picked up the broken crock. “We’ll drop this off at the jail. Then we’ll start asking around.”
***
Over the rasp of the up-and-down saw they spoke with Kepler’s fellow workers at the sawmill. Kepler had no enemies that anyone knew of. The boss called him “a dependable lad, always on time and done what he was told.”
They stopped people on the street, went into shops, quizzed clerks and layabouts and tradesmen and hostlers, men and women, and no one knew anything about the attack, nor anything about the victim or the potential attacker, either.
At suppertime they spoke with the Shaws again and interviewed their five other boarders. All of them had stayed in on the evening of the assault, four of them playing whist in the parlor while the fifth read Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra. None of the men could tell them anything of note. Although sobered by their housemate’s death, none appeared ill at ease or aroused Gideon’s or Alonzo’s suspicions in any way.
***
Next morning on Burying Hill the clouds seemed close enough that Gideon thought he might reach up and grab some of their wool. Mr. and Mrs. Shaw had trudged up into the mist with him, and the foreman from the sawmill. No one else. The preacher’s words, the same ones that had been read at the judge’s burying, slipped through Gideon’s mind, which dwelt instead on a rhyme he had read in the Wesleyan Methodist: “All living things that fly or leap, Or crawl or swim or run or creep, Fear Death, yet they can find no spot in all the world where Death is not.”
At the jail Gideon read through the letters he had taken from Kepler’s room. They were all in Hoch Deutsch, High German, Pennsylfawnisch Deitsch being a dialect and not a written language. He found the letters somewhat difficult to parse out. Not because the handwriting was bad, but because he hadn’t read German or even thought in it for a long time, except sometimes in his dreams or when a certain word or phrase popped into his head.
The letters told him that Kepler’s parents had been neither angry nor disappointed at their son’s removal to a new place. In fact, several passages suggested that Yost had been looking the area over and that other family members might follow if and when he established himself.
Gideon got out a sheet of paper. He took a quill and used his penknife to trim it to the proper angle, slit the end, and chisel the nib. He uncapped the inkwell.
Should he write in German or English? If the Keplers knew only German, no doubt they could get someone to translate if he wrote in English. And he doubted that he could do a decent job of putting his thoughts into Deutsch; two years had passed since he’d written anything in that language.
He did not consider himself German or Pennsylvania Dutch, but simply an American. Some people in Colerain County dismissed him as the proverbial dumb Dutchman, as more than a few might have judged Yost Kepler.
He went to dip the pen, then held off, remembering his last day on the farm. He felt again the heat of his father’s glare. His dawdy had reached out with both hands and taken hold of his arms above the elbows, gripping them hard enough to hurt. He put his face two inches away from Gideon’s.
“You will not leav
e us,” he said in Deitsch.
“I will leave if I want to,” Gideon retorted in English.
“I should have taken you in hand years ago.” His father’s eyes burned. “Ever since your mother—” He bit off his words. “This English you have learned …”
“A man needs English to be a success.”
“Pah. You have all that you need right here. You don’t have to go any farther than Lancaster to get whatever you want.”
“Lancaster.” Gideon spat out the word like it was the sourest bottom-of-the-barrel kraut.
“This will be your farm,” his father said urgently. “It will come down to you in the course of time.”
“Give it to Friedrich. He wants it, I don’t.”
“You are the firstborn.”
Gideon shrugged—hard to do with iron hands clamping his arms.
“We have farmed this land for eighty years,” his father said.
He knew that anything he told his father would not be listened to. He did not want to farm. He hated farming. Plowing, sowing, cultivating, reaping, threshing—the same chores year after year on the same patch of land. Spreading manure, that most aggravating of tasks, fork the stinking shit into the wagon, dig it out again with the hook, scatter it over every inch of ground. Haying on the hottest summer days, with the sweat running into your eyes as they darted to the heavens and watched the gathering clouds, the knot in your stomach: Will it rain? He thought he resented the never-ending fact of the work even more than the backbreaking rigor of it. And what was there to liven such an existence? A market day, a butchering, an auction. Trooping off to church every Sunday to listen to the humbug pastor in his robes and ruff, elevated above the congregation in the pulpit, the sounding board at his back directing his predictable Deutsch words to the same set of vacant benumbed faces.
His father shot a glance toward the hilltop graveyard. “Our people’s bones are in this ground.”
Gideon almost wilted. “Un mei memmi’s,” he choked out. Tears sprang to his eyes. He would not let himself cry. He had always wanted to cry over what had happened to her, but he had never been able to let down his guard enough to do it. Anyway, he was damned if he’d weep in front of his father. In the absence of that release, he felt rage build in him. Why didn’t you protect her? Why haven’t you turned over every piece of shit on this god-damned place to find the one who killed her?
He struggled against the pinioning grip. He searched for what he imagined might be the worst insult he could throw into the old man’s face. “The people in their graves on that hill,” he blurted, “they wasted their lives in this shit hole.”
The explosion against the side of his head knocked him down. He lay with his mouth open, tasting dirt. He hunched up, waiting for a boot in the arsch or the ribs; his father rarely stopped with one blow. But this time no more blows came. Gideon heard a curse, then hard footsteps receding.
He worked himself up to a sitting position. Gradually the barn righted itself. The house beneath the big sycamore swam back into focus.
He struggled to his feet. His ear and the whole side of his head pulsed hotly. A high-pitched ringing filled his head. He staggered to where he had hitched Maude to the post. He leaned his cheek against the saddle, smelled the sun-warmed leather. Then he freed the reins, put his foot in the stirrup, and hauled himself up. A wave of dizziness almost toppled him. As he listed sideways, he felt Maude shift that way to put herself beneath him.
Friedrich came out of the barn. He reached up and placed a hand on Gideon’s arm. Two years separated them. They were both tall and broad-shouldered, although Friedrich had dark hair like their father’s while Gideon’s hair was sandy yellow like their mother’s. Gideon had gotten her regular features and good looks. Friedrich had a rawboned, long-jawed face like their dawdy. The neighbors and aunts and uncles had always pampered Gideon, but it was Friedrich they respected. He wondered if Friedrich had seen his father knock him down. He decided he didn’t care.
“You could stay,” Friedrich said. “You’ve always been a good mechanic. You could go into business, open a wheel shop—we can make over the old hay barn, we don’t use it so much.”
He must have known his words were in vain. His Deitsch words. Beneath those words, a note of relief?
Gideon shook his head, sending a rock of pain battering back and forth between his temples. He turned and took one last look at the house where he had found her. Friedrich had not seen their mother lying bloody and defiled on the floor—Gideon had made sure, he’d gone out in the yard and grabbed his younger brother and held him while screaming for someone to come help. When his sisters showed up at a run, he had begged them not to go inside the kitchen, either.
He shook Friedrich’s hand off his arm. A hurt look came to Friedrich’s face. Gideon had clucked to Maude and ridden out of the farmyard.
***
In the jail, he sat staring at the quill in his hand and the sheet of blank paper on his desk. The letters Yost Kepler had received from his family lay in a stack to one side. Surely Kepler had corresponded with his kin, written back to his parents and brothers and sisters. Since the day Gideon left Lancaster County, he hadn’t sent a single letter home. His family had no idea where he had gone. They didn’t know that he had crossed the Susquehanna, that he had narrowly escaped being robbed and killed in the Seven Mountains. They did not know that he had become a deputy, then a sheriff, a husband and the father of a son.
He should write and at least let them know he was alive. Now, though, he must pen a different letter.
In English, in a plain, straightforward way, he told the Keplers that their son had died from a blow to the head received during what appeared to be a robbery. Yost had been buried in Adamant with proper Christian rites. The expense of coffining and burying him would be deducted from the sixty-two dollars and eighty cents in his bank account, and a draft for the remainder of the money would be sent to them. If the family wished to have a marker put up over the grave, they should inform him, and he would advise as to cost. He wrote that, as sheriff, he would do everything in his power to apprehend and bring to justice the person or persons who had committed this despicable crime.
How to do that? For the moment, he had no better strategy than Alonzo’s: Keep talking to people. Keep folks thinking about what they might have seen or heard, don’t let them forget what had happened to Yost Kepler down in Hammertown.
He counted the letters he had taken from Kepler’s room: an even dozen of them. He would keep them on file, wait to hear back from Kepler’s people, then package the letters and return them to the family. He tapped the edges of the sheets against the desktop to square them up. Something caught his eye, scrawled in pencil on the back of the bottom-most letter:
J Burns
One of True’s brothers—one of the jaybirds? He frowned. Why would Kepler know any of them? He turned the sheet over and read through the letter again. Nothing special, just a message from home telling who in the neighborhood was getting married, how high the corn was, the sow had pigged, Cousin Mary’s baby was colicky, that sort of thing. He checked through all of the letters and found no other penciled additions.
Just that one J Burns scrawled on the back of a single sheet.
The serving woman at the House of Lords had described the young man who had drunk with Yost two nights ago as medium-sized, clean-shaven, with a face as plain as buttered bread; talkative, a whoreson who hadn’t left a tip. She had never seen him before; he was a complete stranger. Certainly that man had to be his prime suspect. But the woman also mentioned another companion with whom she had seen Yost a couple of weeks earlier. That one was big and ugly, strong looking, with dark hair and a pockmarked face. To Gideon it sounded a lot like True’s brother Jesse. He would find Jesse, maybe learn something from him. Maybe—the thought jolted him—Jesse was somehow involved in Kepler’s death.
The serving woman had said that Plain as Buttered Bread wore a red vest. The vest had a pattern on it like pic
kles. What would it look like if you emptied a crock of pickles onto a red tablecloth?
Something nagged at his brain. In the Panther Valley, on the road to True’s grandmother’s house: the traveler he had met. Talkative. From a town with a strange name—Chinclaclamoose, it sounded like an Indian name—a town Gideon had never visited, a settlement even farther out in the sticks than Adamant. His name: George, George something … a country, wasn’t it? Yes. George England. The man had lied to him, given false information about where he’d spent the night. True’s grandmother had blacked him a scoundrel through and through.
He closed his eyes and tried to put himself back on Maude under that dull and threatening sky. He mentally called up the dun horse the stranger had ridden. It was long-bodied, he remembered that. It looked strong and fit. About fifteen hands. A very good-looking horse. He tried to recall the rest of their conversation. It shouldn’t be too hard, it was only the day before yesterday that he laid eyes on the man, even though it seemed to Gideon as if a much longer span of time had passed—could that be because he had ridden so far, and talked so long with True’s grandmother, and then spent hours reading intently in the judge’s journals of the past? Gideon thought about the dun horse again and the man who looked like he could ride that horse very well. The man was of medium height and weight, clean-shaven, with a dirt-smudged face. The man had sniffed the air and commented on the weather. Said he was riding to Adamant and then asked about jobs in the town. “Safe travels,” Gideon had said when their conversation ended, and “I hope you find Adamant to your liking.” In his mind’s eye, Gideon saw the dun horse step forward, start to go past. The young man had touched his hat brim in salutation. Gideon had seen something else. What was it? He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead. A red feather stuck in the fellow’s hatband? No. Lower down. Peeking out from behind a missing button on the coat. That’s what it was: Beneath his overcoat the stranger had been wearing a red vest. If it had a green pattern on it, Gideon hadn’t noticed.
A Stranger Here Below Page 11
