A Stranger Here Below

by Charles Fergus

  It felt strange to Gideon to be sitting there while a killer crouched three feet behind him. Farther back, Maude shuffled restively at the end of a rope tied to the back of the wagon.

  Baker sat hunched over. He did not look comfortable or happy. McGee smiled at him. “I figured this one might stretch a rope someday,” he said. “Looks like that’ll be your job, sheriff.

  “Hey, Gib,” he said to Baker. “Be a good boy for Sheriff Stoltz. Do whatever he tells you, and always talk polite.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “I might come and watch you hang,” McGee said.

  “They got nothin’ on me.”

  “Two murders,” McGee said. “Don’t worry, they’ll only hang you once.”

  ***

  Gideon coughed, and pain rasped in his throat. His shoulder still hurt from where the club had hit him. He sat on the hard seat and let the horses pick their way along the road. It would be a two-day drive back to Adamant. Baker wasn’t talking, and Gideon had no wish to speak with him anyway. Baker’s half-lidded eyes sent a chill through him. He thought of the old man, Nat Thompson—it had to be Nat Thompson, who else could it be?—looking into those eyes, the last human things he would see, eyes that held no mercy, and the knife driving through his upraised hands, hacking them, knocking them aside, plunging into his heart, the hot blood spraying out, and how the terror must have cascaded through Nat Thompson’s being when he knew his death had come.

  Don’t let even a single thought of your memmi come into your head, he told himself. Or you might take the whip out of the socket and turn around and flay the son of a bitch to death.

  He drove east across the high plateau with its few impoverished farms and long stretches of low scrub oak and laurel and dense stands of chestnut and rock oak. The leaves were gone from the hardwood trees. The wagon’s axles groaned as the rig slewed through the mud. Around midday the rain ceased, a gold slit carved itself in the clouds, and a shaft of sunlight fell upon the wagon. Harness fittings gleamed. Steam rose from the horses’ backs. Gideon looked over his shoulder. Baker stared at him. His rain cape dazzled.

  The clouds healed themselves and the rain commenced again.

  Gideon chained the wheels before taking the wagon down the road where it descended into Panther Valley from the escarpment of the Allegheny Plateau. The road was narrow, banked with stone on the downhill side. Pull-outs had been dug into the slope on the high side of the road every few hundred yards, in case two wagons met or a wagon and a man on horseback. But no one else was traveling in this weather. The wagon skidded and bumped down the grade. The horses snorted and threw up their heads, holding back the wagon’s weight. Gideon talked to them. “Easy, easy.” A runaway now would kill them all. The horses’ ears pointed back, telling him that they listened, that they trusted the man who was driving them down this slick, rutted road with a steep drop-off on one side. Above, dark hemlocks towered up a hundred feet, their tops lost in cloud. Below, a stream clattered unseen through a jungle of rhododendron.

  Just before dark Gideon found the tavern McGee had told him about. The small log building stood on a lonesome stretch of road. Gideon knew he must have ridden by the place yesterday, but try as he might, he could not remember it; perhaps he’d passed it in the dark.

  The tavern’s occupants were all female. A white-haired woman cooked supper, a lanky girl with bobbed hair tended the fire, and a middle-aged woman with a claw hand served Gideon at the table. Baker ate sitting on the floor, his wrists and ankles shackled.

  The claw-handed woman studied the prisoner. “What crime has he done?”

  “He is a suspect in several crimes,” Gideon said. “I am taking him to jail in Adamant.”

  The woman circled around Baker, her hands on her hips. “I know you, you little shite,” she said. “You bought a meal here last month. Then afterwards you stoled our ax out of the woodshed.” She looked up, an indignant expression on her face. “Sheriff, I want to press charges.”

  Baker laughed so hard he spat food on the floor.

  After the meal Gideon shoved Baker out to a corn crib behind the cabin. He made him sit down and then ran a short chain around one of the wall logs and between Baker’s manacled hands and padlocked the chain’s ends together. He arranged a blanket over Baker’s shoulders with the raincoat on top.

  “Sweet dreams,” he said.

  Inside the cabin, the girl laid a dulcimer on her lap. She always looked down, or would present only one side of her face to Gideon—had done so all evening. He wondered if she was shy, or fearful of the strange armed man who had come to her dwelling, or if someone had used her badly in the past. The girl strummed the dulcimer’s strings with the quill end of a black-and-white turkey feather and sang about a girl named Barbara Allen and a boy named Willie Grove. Though death be printed on his face, and o’er his heart be stealing, yet little better shall he be, for bonny Barb’ry Allen. The dulcimer left a buzzing drone hanging in the air. The fire lit the girl’s profiled face while putting her downcast eyes in shadow. She sang another song, and another, as Gideon and the two older women sat listening.

  In the night Gideon dreamed that the girl laughed and kissed him on the mouth. She probed boldly with her tongue while her hands rummaged through his pockets. She was searching for something, the key to the lock on Baker’s chains. He jerked awake. The grass-filled tick beneath him rustled as he sat up. His face burned and his breath wheezed. The pain in his throat made him swallow, which led to wrenching coughs. He pulled on boots and slicker and went outside. It was still raining. He began to cough again, the hacking stopping him, making him bend over. When he managed to quit coughing he pulled open the door to the corn crib. Baker sat there looking at him.

  Gideon checked the lock and chain. They were secure. “You keeping dry?” he rasped.

  “What’s the matter, sheriff?” Baker said. “Are you taken ill?”

  Gideon breathed heavily through his mouth. “I must have caught a cold.”

  “That’s a pity,” Baker said. “I hate it when anyone feels poorly. Y’know, I been thinking. About the wicked crimes I have done. My heart is burdened, and I feel the need to confess.”

  In the dark, Gideon could barely make out the whites of Baker’s eyes and his teeth. “I admit it,” Baker said, starting to laugh. “It was me done that awful crime. I stoled that ax from them whores.”

  ***

  Around noon the next day Gideon turned the wagon onto the narrow track up Egypt Hollow. At the logging camp he let himself down off the seat. He fumbled his way into the cabin. He wrapped the old tramp’s body in a tarpaulin. He secured the tarpaulin with rope. Again he searched the cabin and found nothing of importance beyond the buck tail hat and the pack and staff. He had to rest for a while before boosting and shoving the corpse up onto the wagon bed. Baker pulled back against his chains, shrinking as far away from the misshapen bundle as he could get.

  Gideon stood in the cabin’s doorway, trying to get his wind back. Outside, the rain fell. He stared at the wagon, at Baker crouching there, at the old tramp’s shrouded body. He tried to shake off his misery with the thought that at least he had caught Baker, taken him alive. But not before Baker had murdered the old tramp. A window onto the past had been shut. What if Baker refused to say who had paid him to kill?

  He put the tramp’s staff on the floorboards at his feet and stowed his pack and hat beneath the wagon’s seat. He took up the reins and clucked to the horses. Carefully he drove down Egypt Hollow. Every few minutes a bout of coughing seized him. Each time it felt like his chest was being ripped apart. He felt hot all over, as if he were standing next to a huge bonfire, and then chills overcame him and he shivered and his teeth chattered. He pulled his coat tight. He sat hunched over. His vision swam. A hymn came to him, a shape-note hymn called “Claremont,” and he sang it to himself over and over again: Trembling, hoping, ling’ring, flying. Oh, the pain, the bliss of dying. Was he dying? This was no cold, it was much worse. The poet
ry became embedded in his brain, droned on and on so that he did not think about it anymore but heard it echoing as he tried to keep his head up and feebly checked the horses with the reins and worked to hold the rig on the muddy branch road.

  He turned onto the road down Panther Valley.

  Later he turned again, onto the road to Adamant.

  The road followed the creek through the gap in the hills. It led beneath the stark bare branches of sycamore trees. He saw the town far away. The courthouse, the academy on the hill. The graveyard on the other hill.

  Oh, the pain, the bliss of dying.

  He realized the wagon had stopped. Alonzo stood looking up at him.

  “Good God almighty!” Alonzo said.

  “Lock him up. Take the body to Doc Beecham. Some things under the seat …”

  “You’re going to the doc yourself,” Alonzo said.

  “No. I’m going home. True will take care of me.”

  Not Jordan’s stream, nor death’s cold flood

  Should fright us from the shore

  Thirty-Two

  He stumbled through muddy empty streets. Darkness falling fast. His knees wobbled. He saw everything through a haze. True’s mother met him at the door, her face drawn and her eyes red.

  She gripped him by the shoulders. “She’s sick,” she said, “awful sick. The influenza.” She looked at him more closely, laid the back of her hand against his forehead. “You’re going straight to bed.”

  He staggered inside. “Where is she?” His father-in-law took his arm and led him into the bedroom. True’s head lay against the pillow. Her face was pale. A moan escaped her lips. She opened her eyes, saw him, and tried to raise herself up, only to fall back on the bed. The word came out as a sob: “David.”

  The cradle sat in the corner. David’s face was shrunken and collapsed. He didn’t move, didn’t smile, didn’t reach up with his little hand toward his father. Slowly it dawned on Gideon. His heart breaking, he touched his hot fingers to his son’s cheek. Cold.

  “He passed early this afternoon,” True’s mother said.

  And I wasn’t here, Gideon thought. They wanted to take him elsewhere, separate him from his wife and child, but he fought out of their hands and got in bed with True. He wrapped his arms around her. He buried his face in her breast and wept.

  ***

  He came awake as coughing wracked him. Opening his eyes, he seemed to view the world through thick green glass. He was alone. He didn’t know where he was. He closed his eyes and felt a great wave come crashing down, tearing him away, dragging him down into cold silent depths.

  He fought against it, seeming to rise from a dark and heavy realm and surface again into murky light. He realized he was not in his own bed or even in his own house. He cried out for True, tried to rise, felt the great irresistible wave drag him down again. Then he was running slowly and clumsily through the rain in a wood of twisted trees with black trunks studded with thorns and blotched with yellow lichens. In a clearing he came upon a cabin. He kicked the door open and went inside. His mother was there, seated in a chair, and he looked at her, and they were both sad, terribly sad, for she understood that her grandson David was dead. She took his hand in hers. Her eyes filled with tears. No words passed between them, no words could express their pain.

  ***

  His mother-in-law spooned broth into his mouth.

  “True …?” he managed to croak.

  “Alive. We thought we’d lost her. We thought we’d lost both of you.”

  His mother-in-law put her hand on his chest and gently pressed him back down on the bed. He slept. He slept for what seemed like ages. Then someone was shaking him by the foot. It was Davey Burns. His father-in-law did not say anything; he helped Gideon get out of bed and into his shirt and trousers. His big rough hands eased boots onto Gideon’s feet.

  As he let himself be dressed, Gideon held out his hand and stared at it, front and then back, and concluded that it was real, it was his hand, the fingers moved like his fingers had always moved, the skin stretched and wrinkled in the usual places, the scar winked white across one knuckle where, as a boy, he had cut himself whittling a little horse out of a chunk of basswood.

  Davey Burns put his brawny arm around Gideon and held up his son-in-law while guiding him outside and across the street to Gideon’s own house.

  True sat in a chair in the kitchen. Gideon fell to his knees and put his arms around her hips, felt her hands settle on his head, her fingers grip his hair.

  David lay on a broad pine board in the unfinished room that was supposed to be a parlor someday. He wore a gray linen dress. His eyes, collapsed, stared blankly beneath half-lowered lids. Gideon detected the smell of corrupt flesh, not quite masked by the lavender simmering in a kettle over the fire.

  The house filled with people. They clustered around David and True and Gideon. They laid their hands on True’s back, on Gideon’s back. True’s grandmother was there, and the people fell silent as she took a platter of something white and brown and held it up for all to see, then lowered it and placed it on the board next to David. The white was salt and the brown was earth. Gram Burns made True and Gideon both get up and touch David’s body. Gideon felt his heart break all over again.

  “I thought it was another baby sickness,” True said. He could barely hear her voice, so quietly did she speak.

  He kissed the back of her hand and held it against his cheek. He remembered True’s dream of bloody white teeth. She hadn’t reminded him, hadn’t said “I told you so.” He didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe she didn’t, either.

  A coincidence?

  And was it also a coincidence that she had dreamed about the judge and Rachel McEwan arguing with each other—and two candles burning low and guttering out at the same time? Two incidents that Hiram Biddle had described thirty years ago in a diary that True had never read?

  Someone prayed in a voice that rose and fell. Then other voices took up song. They started off ragged, strengthening and becoming purer as more people joined in. And am I born to die? To lay this body down! It was “Idumea,” the shape-note hymn Gideon knew so well. He tried to sing, but his voice cracked and his throat seared and he fell silent. He heard True’s parents singing, and the jaybirds and their wives: Waked by the trumpet sound, I from my grave shall rise; and see the Judge with glory crowned, and see the flaming skies!

  He realized that True wasn’t singing. He looked up. Her eyes were dry. She stared straight ahead. Her face looked frozen. It wore an expression of deep pain, and something else. He thought it was bitterness.

  The light in the room grew dim. His vision swam, and the water, cold and green, rose up and swallowed him again.

  Are there anybody here like jailers a-tremblin’?

  Call to my Jesus and he’ll draw nigh

  Thirty-Three

  The state’s attorney came out from behind his desk and held out his hand. As far as Gideon could remember, it was the first time the Cold Fish had ever offered to shake hands with him.

  “Good work, sheriff,” Alvin Fish said, pumping Gideon’s hand. “Doing your duty, even with you being so ill, to the point of almost succumbing. And please, let me offer my condolences for the death of your child. This influenza epidemic has hit the county hard.”

  Fish sat back down and placed his spectacles on his nose. Their lenses turned his eyes into peppercorns. He indicated another chair. “Do sit down. I can see you are not yet returned to a robust state of health. A little friendly advice: You may wish to have yourself bled. It is an excellent restorative measure when the body has been weakened by disease.” He cleared his throat, tapped his fingers against Gideon’s report lying on his desk. “Thanks to the thoroughness of your investigation, I am reasonably certain that we will be able to convict George Baker for the murder of Yost Kepler.”

  Gideon nodded.

  “It is largely a circumstantial case,” Fish said. “But I believe the evidence will convince a jury. Yes, I predict that
man will hang.”

  “About the hanging. I … I don’t know how to do that.”

  “We’ll figure it out, I’m sure. There have been hangings in Colerain County in the past.” He paused. “But let’s not get the cart before the horse. First we need to secure a conviction.”

  “About the killing of the old tramp …”

  “Don’t let it bother you.”

  “Baker also murdered that old man.”

  Fish joined his hands, carefully placing his fingertips together. He stared at them for a long while, then looked up. “Your report states that you met George Baker on the road in Egypt Hollow, approximately half a mile from the scene of that very recent killing.”

  “It was a brutal murder. He hacked that old man to pieces. Cut his throat so deep he almost took his head off. The coroner’s report spells it out.”

  “Indeed. But let me be frank. There is little point in our focusing on that crime at this point in time. We can be thankful that, owing to your diligence and hard work, a depraved killer is now behind bars and the public is in no further danger. As I said, we will prosecute and convict George Baker for murdering that poor Dutch lad.”

  “And for killing the old tramp.”

  Fish contemplated his steepled fingers again. “No need for that,” he said.

  “The evidence for that case is strong, too.”

  “Let me evaluate the strength or weakness of any body of evidence.” Fish separated his fingers and took off his spectacles. He pointed them at Gideon. “Should Baker be convicted of murder in the first degree for killing Yost Kepler, there is no need to try him for the second murder.”

  “What? Are you joking?”

  Fish’s eyes narrowed. “No, Sheriff Stoltz, I am not ‘choking,’ as you put it. Keep in mind that every trial costs the county a substantial sum of money. Particularly a trial for capital murder.”

  Gideon’s throat tightened and he started coughing. Fish backed his chair as far away as he could get.