A Stranger Here Below

by Charles Fergus

  “The ironmaster grabs whatever money he has lying around, shoves it into Nat’s hands, tells him, Get out of here, leave this place and don’t come back. Maybe that was the arrangement they had thirty years ago, and Nat broke his promise not to return.

  “Nat is angry because his brother won’t give him the money he thinks he deserves—and, from his appearance, apparently needs. So he goes to the judge to see what his legal options are. He has no idea of the trick his brother played three decades ago. But he learns it from the judge.” Gideon took another swallow. He thought of what the judge’s housekeeper and his own mother-in-law had told him. “Could he have gone back to the big house to demand more money from his brother? To blackmail him?”

  “And how would Adonijah Thompson then react?” Foote said. “Would he tell Nat to go into hiding again, until he could gather more money, a lot of money, to pay him off once and for all?”

  Gideon stared into the fire flickering low on the hearth. “Or would the ironmaster decide he can never let his brother go again?”

  ***

  True stood in the doorway to their house. When Gideon made to enter, she grudgingly moved aside. She sniffed. “You’ve been drinking. You went down to Hammertown.”

  “No. I went in the other direction entirely.” He pointed a finger upward, smiled at his wit. Ach, the headmaster’s whiskey was powerful stuff.

  She put her hands on her hips.

  “I walked around town,” he said. “In case you didn’t know, it’s what a sheriff is supposed to do.” Her frown deepened, and he regretted what he’d said. “True, honey, I went up on Academy Hill. The headmaster was out on the lawn, looking at a comet through his spyglass. Imagine, Halley’s Comet has appeared in the heavens! Mr. Foote invited me inside. We went up to his rooms and had a drink. Well, maybe it was two drinks.” He looked at her. “I stayed out too long. I’m sorry. You have every right to be cross with me.”

  Her face softened. “Gid, I was worried. I still am. I’m worried about the judge killing himself, and that boy getting murdered, and now you tell me that Nat Thompson may not be dead.” She pressed against him. “Let’s not fight anymore. Come, come to bed.”

  O could we make our doubts remove,

  Those gloomy doubts that rise.

  Twenty-Five

  In the morning his head ached. True was less than sympathetic. She fed him breakfast, and he hoofed it to the jail.

  With some misgivings, because it all seemed so improbable, he told Alonzo what he suspected about the return of Nat Thompson. Alonzo sniffed at Gideon’s breath. Then he withdrew his head and turned his face so that his eyes, opened wide, regarded Gideon with an exaggeratedly surprised sidelong glance. “You’re joking,” he said.

  “No, I’m not joking.”

  “Well. Time will tell.”

  “Perhaps it will, and perhaps it won’t,” Gideon said. “Anyway, please don’t mention it to anyone.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that.”

  Gideon had also asked Headmaster Foote not to say anything about their conversation; he didn’t want word of his suspicions to spread. And he had no clear idea of how to proceed, or even how to find the old tramp, let alone the man with the dun horse and the red vest. He sat down at his desk and busied himself filing away papers that had accumulated over the past few days. He paid out a bounty on a wolf cape that a trapper brought in. He looked through a batch of notices from southern states describing escaped slaves who might be headed north. Finally it became impossible for him to stay at his desk.

  He spent the rest of the day walking around the town watching out and talking with people. He went back to places Yost Kepler had frequented: his rooming house, the sawmill, the post office where he picked up his mail. He talked to mill workers, people in stores and on the street, and he learned nothing new.

  In the evening he left True and David and went to Hammertown. He quizzed barkeeps and serving girls and women out strolling singly and in pairs and drinkers shifting between saloons. No one knew anything about the man who called himself George England. No one, save the serving girl in the House of Lords, remembered seeing anyone wearing a red vest. No one had met an old tramp sporting a buck tail hat. No one could tell him anything about the night when Yost Kepler had been assaulted. And no one seemed to care.

  He plodded down the street in a funk. He went into the alley where Kepler had been found eight days ago. The alley still reeked of rotting food and piss and excrement. He stood in the shadows and thought hard, hoping some revelation, some new idea, would come to him. Sporadic rustling sounds issued from among the heaps of trash. A calico cat stalked past the opening to the alley, stopped, looked into it, then bunched its legs beneath itself and ran—Gideon knew he hadn’t scared it, because it raced past his boots before disappearing into the darkness farther down the alley.

  He stood there mulling over ways he might investigate Kepler’s murder, how he might locate the old tramp, and in the back of his mind he asked himself why that cat had bolted. When he heard the sound of movement and a hiss of breath, he quickly ducked aside. He felt a glancing blow to his head, then pain exploded between his shoulder and neck. He fell to the ground and immediately rolled sideways as a club thudded hard into the dirt where his head had been.

  He yelled, rolled farther, scrambled to his feet. He heard someone running away down the alley. Panting, he leaned against the rough wood siding of a saloon. Pain shot down his shoulder and arm and up his neck. He moved his arm, groaned out loud. He wondered if his collarbone was broken; he didn’t think it was, but that part of his body practically screamed with pain.

  He took a few halting steps in the direction his attacker had run. The only light in Hammertown glimmered in the street, leaking out from saloons’ meager windows. The alley lay deep in shadow, the wall of a building on one side lit faintly by starlight. Suddenly he was filled with fear. He touched the muscle between his shoulder and neck. Pain flared again. His ear and the side of his head pulsed. He decided that the last thing he should do was to blunder ahead in the darkness and give his assailant another chance.

  Who could have done it? People might not like the fact that a Dutchman had been put above them as sheriff, but he didn’t think anyone would attack him for that. This came from his investigation. It was tied to his search for George England. Or for the old tramp. Someone wanted to hurt him. Maybe even kill him. He wondered how far the ironmaster’s reach might extend.

  He stumbled in to a saloon and, despite the star on his jacket, lay down money for a drink. He took the glass to a table in the corner and collapsed onto a bench with his back against the wall. A serving woman brought him a rag. “Something happen to you?” she said.

  He took the rag from her and held the cloth against his ear; it came away bloody. “Someone hit me with a club. In the alley.”

  “Lucky you didn’t end up like that Dutch boy,” she said, then went on to the next table.

  He glanced at the men and women in the saloon. Three Negro men drank together at another table—this was The Horse, the bar where colored folk might come and drink. He looked around and saw the place for the drab, lonely wasteland that it was. He had formed an understanding that there was no law that could stop anyone from doing anything. No law in Adamant, or Colerain County, or Pennsylvania, no law in the land could truly protect people. We are each of us alone, he thought bleakly. We have only ourselves to depend on, and maybe one or two others. But no one can possibly defend us. Not sheriffs or judges. And nothing watches over us, no Almighty God looks down and keeps us from harm. How I doubt, Gideon thought. And he who doubts is damned.

  Long in silence I have waited,

  Long thy guilt in secret grown …

  Twenty-Six

  The next day, despite a shoulder and arm that still throbbed with pain, Gideon saddled Maude and rode her to Panther. He checked at the store and was glad to see that the poster asking for information about George England remained on the wall. No, the s
torekeeper had not seen the man the poster described, nor any old man with a buck tail on his hat. “Guess you’ll have to keep looking, Sheriff,” he said in a sarcastic tone.

  Gideon got some advice and directions from a worker at the furnace, then rode out of the settlement and followed a narrow wagon road into the woods. Here the trees had been cut for charcoal decades ago, and now a new generation of trees was being axed again to provide more fuel for the ironworks.

  Where the wagon road entered a clearing, Maude tossed her head and sneezed. Gideon smelled the acrid odor, too. In the middle of the clearing stood a beehive-shaped mound thirty feet across and twelve feet high, with white smoke rising lazily from its top. Four men stood looking up at the smoke. Gideon noticed that the white smoke was interrupted by a faster-rising plume of bluish smoke.

  Maude picked her way past chopped-off stumps and scattered treetops. As Gideon drew near, he heard his father-in-law say, “You got a mull.”

  Davey Burns stood next to a scrawny man whose head came barely to Burns’s shoulder. Burns and the scrawny man gave Gideon a glance, then returned their attention to the smoke issuing from the mound.

  The scrawny man took a shovel and, motioning for the two other colliers to follow him, climbed up onto the mound. Soot blackened the men’s faces and clothing. Taking small, light steps, they shuffled their feet over the layer of dirt and leaves that covered the mound, all the while gently tapping the surface with the backs of their shovels. Gideon knew what they were doing: jumping the pit, trying to find and seal a breach where air was leaking in. The extra air was causing the fire inside to burn too quickly, which, if it continued, could turn the charcoal into worthless ash. It was dangerous work. If the covering gave way beneath them, the men could plunge into the smoldering charcoal and burn to death.

  Davey Burns kept his eyes on the smoke. Gideon dismounted, knowing not to interrupt. When the bluish smoke turned white, Burns called up, “You got it. Now get your sorry asses down here.”

  He turned to Gideon. “This one should come to foot in a day or two. We get her done, and a half-dozen others, then we’re finished for the year.” His eyes were red and bleary. He rubbed them with the heels of his hands. “How’d you know where to find me?”

  “I asked at the ironworks. And I followed the smoke.”

  Burns gave Gideon the smug smile he reserved for his Dutch son-in-law. “I seen the notice you put up in the company store. I can’t read too good, so I had the storekeeper read it to me.”

  “The man the handbill describes, the one calling himself George England. Have you hired anyone by that name?”

  Burns coughed, a deep, ragged hacking that went on for a while. He cleared his throat and spat. His voice was gravelly. “A young jake asked me for a job a week or so ago. He may have said his name was George. Can’t recall his last name, or if he even gave one.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Light-colored hair, clean-shaven. It was his horse I noticed. A dun, damn good-looking animal.”

  “Did you hire the man?”

  Burns shook his head. “Like I said, we’re about done coalin’ for the year. But I seen the horse again, at the stable, the one in Panther.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Three, four days. Could be he got some other job.”

  “Why didn’t you come tell me?”

  Burns smiled and shrugged. “I do my job. Why should I do yours?”

  Gideon was fed up. It was the closest he had come to getting a lead on the man with the dun horse. And it was just like Davey Burns not to help his Dutch son-in-law. “All right,” he said. “I would like you to do me a favor. This evening, please ask your sons, as many of them as you can find, whether they have seen this George England with the red vest and the dun horse. Can you do that much for me?”

  Davey Burns shrugged, then nodded.

  Gideon footed the stirrup and swung up onto Maude. He suppressed a gasp at the pain that lanced through his injured shoulder. “I’ll come by your house tomorrow morning.”

  “Make it early. I work for a living.”

  ***

  By chance, on the road back to Adamant, Gideon met Jesse Burns, riding a roan horse with a white-splotched nose and a hammer head—an animal just as ugly as its rider, Gideon decided. The roan flattened its mouth and fought the bit when Jesse jerked it to a stop.

  “Brother Gideon,” Jesse said. “You are like a bad penny, showin’ up here, showin’ up there.”

  “Just doing what the county pays me to do.” Gideon gritted his teeth, both against his hurt shoulder and his annoying brother-in-law. “I told you earlier that I found your name written on a piece of paper in Yost Kepler’s room. In the saloon, you denied that you had ever met him, but a woman at the House of Lords told me she saw you drinking with Kepler some time ago.”

  “That woman made a mistake.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You calling me a liar?”

  Gideon was exasperated. He wanted to learn from Jesse anything about Yost Kepler that might help him find out why the man had been murdered. He was sick and tired of Jesse’s obstructive belligerence. He was ready to get down off of Maude and have it out with his brother-in-law, right there in the road. Even though he knew it would be the height of stupidity to fight Jesse, especially with his shoulder bruised so badly he could barely lift his arm. “Yes,” he said, “I’m calling you a liar. A no-good, lickspittle liar.”

  Jesse’s mouth fell open. After a moment, he laughed. “Have it your way, Brother Gideon. Yeah, I had a drink with that Dutch boy.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “None of yours.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  Jesse’s mouth gaped again, and his eyes narrowed above his pocked cheeks. “Hell, no. By God, you’re a suspicious bastard.”

  “And you, Jesse Burns, are as different from your sister as night and day. All you do is schpeddle me for being Dutch. You are as ill-mannered as a dog that no one has bothered to train.”

  Jesse grinned. “You plan on training me, Brother Gideon? Till you do, this here doch is happy to lift his mangy leg and piss on your Dutch foot.” He took off his hat, bowed, and swept it low, then walked his horse past. The roan snaked out its coarse head and tried to bite Maude. Jesse laughed.

  I’ll reprove thee, I’ll reprove thee,

  Till thy crimes exact are known

  Twenty-Seven

  The comet pointed downward as if streaking toward a collision with the earth. It held there fixed and otherworldly, its head and tail and the stars behind it slowly dimming as the sky brightened toward dawn.

  It was Saturday, the sixth of November. Gideon rode alone toward Panther. He had decided to take Jack, whom the judge had willed to him. He wanted to rest Maude after riding her yesterday. And he wanted to see what sort of a saddle horse Jack might be. He knew that Hiram Biddle had ridden Jack on occasion, although mainly he used the gelding to pull the light wagon or the carriage.

  Jack had a good reaching walk. Past the town’s outskirts, Gideon asked him to speed up by touching his heels against the horse’s sides. Jack kept up his stolid walk. He pointed his ears back at Gideon as if to say, “I don’t think you really want to go any faster than this.” Gideon clucked to the gelding and kicked him harder. To no effect. “All right, you.” He got down and, with his pocketknife, cut a limber switch from a willow growing beside the road. When he got back on, Jack took off unbidden in a fast canter that was nevertheless easy to sit. Gideon grinned. “Good horse,” he said. “You can slow down whenever you want.”

  Jack seemed to understand the calming tone of Gideon’s voice, for he dropped back into a soft rocking-chair canter.

  Gideon alternated cantering Jack and letting him walk down the road. The sky grew red in the east.

  Gideon took stock of how he felt: excited and hopeful and a bit scared all at once.
His encounter with Jesse still had him upset. True hadn’t helped his mood this morning, either.

  She’d woken him out of a sound sleep, gripping him by the shoulder. He barely managed to stifle a cry at the pain that caused—True didn’t know he’d been hurt; on both of the last two nights he’d managed to get into his nightshirt without letting her see how bruised his shoulder was. “Gid, Gid,” she cried out. She was almost weeping. “I had a dream.” He took her in his arms. Her voice slurred. “I was in a dark place, a cellar or a cave, maybe a grave! And this thing, this face, came at me.” She began to weep. “It was wrinkled and gray, full of disease and rot, and it came right up to me and I couldn’t get away. It opened its mouth and showed me its teeth.” She wept harder. “White teeth! Covered with blood!”

  He tried to comfort her, assured her that dreams didn’t mean anything.

  “No, you don’t understand,” she said. “Of course a dream can have a meaning. That kind of dream always has a meaning.” Her breathing was rapid. “If the teeth had been yellow, it would mean an old person will die. But these teeth were white. Like a child’s! It means somebody young is going to die.”

  She looked at him with terrified eyes. Then she tore herself out of his arms and hurried off into the darkness to fetch David from his crib. All that had done was waken and upset the child. She’d come back to bed with a crying baby, at which point Gideon got himself up. He was disgusted and angry. “I didn’t need to get woken up like that. For a bad dream.” He shivered in the cold room. “But now I may as well stay up. I’m going to the ironworks today. Maybe I’ll get lucky and make an arrest on the man who killed Yost Kepler.”

  “Don’t go,” she blurted. “Please, Gid. Come back to bed. Don’t go to the ironworks. Nothing good waits for you there.”

  “What nonsense,” he had said, then stalked off to the kitchen to start a fire and hunt up something to eat.