A Stranger Here Below

by Charles Fergus

  “Mr. Fish,” Gideon said weakly. “That old tramp, he may have been Nathaniel Thompson, the ironmaster’s brother.”

  “I read that in your report. Pure speculation. The ironmaster’s brother has been dead for thirty years.”

  “The two men at the stable, they …”

  “They allege that Baker stayed at the stable before going off on some sort of ‘iron company business.’”

  “It wasn’t ‘iron company business,’” Gideon said. “Adonijah Thompson sent George Baker to kill that old man.”

  “Soft-brains, both of those stable hands,” said Fish, his voice heavy with scorn. “Completely unreliable as witnesses.”

  “Think about what took place in 1805,” Gideon said. “The trial of the preacher, Thomas McEwan, his confession, his conviction and hanging—those things may all have happened because of a horrible mistake, or more likely an evil trick.”

  Fish scoffed. “The records for those events are gone, burned up. The trial was before my time. I did not come to Colerain County until eight years later. But I can say with complete certainty that all we know at this point—all we need to know—is that in 1805 the Reverend Thomas McEwan confessed to killing and burying Nat Thompson and was subsequently hanged for his crime.”

  “Other suspicious things have happened. Like Judge Biddle committing suicide the day after the tramp came to his house.”

  “Yes. The judge is dead. A most unfortunate occurrence. That is one less witness to talk to, about the trial or anything else that may have happened back then.”

  “The judge’s journal …”

  “It’s around here somewhere. I took the liberty of having it brought over from the jail. It is simply a somewhat biased personal account of an old trial. Mildly interesting from an historical perspective, but not relevant. Certainly not anything I would be comfortable presenting as evidence in a court of law.”

  “I’ll get Baker to talk.”

  “No one would believe him.”

  “I will question the ironmaster.”

  “You’ll do no such thing. As the commonwealth’s attorney, I order you to cease any investigation into the matter.”

  Gideon got up from his chair. Fish looked at him for a moment, then put his spectacles back on and began shuffling papers on his desk. He glanced up. Gideon was still standing there.

  “I don’t like this,” Gideon said.

  “I don’t care whether you like it or not.”

  “I do not like the stench of this.”

  Fish’s face hardened. “You are impertinent. Let me remind you that I decide which cases are strong enough to prosecute, and which cases are a waste of time and the county’s resources. You are merely a sheriff.” He relaxed his frown. “Don’t worry, you’ll get your conviction. You’ll get to hang George Baker for killing your Dutch compatriot. Now, if you will excuse me, I have work to do.”

  Gideon considered slapping the spectacles off of Fish’s head. Instead, he made himself turn and walk out of the office.

  ***

  He dragged a chair down the aisle and set it facing Baker’s cell. Baker lay on his cot, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling.

  “He don’t say much.” Alonzo leaned against the door jamb. “I thought he’d be a blatherskite, leastwise that’s what the serving wench at the House of Lords said. But it appears he’s a man of few words.”

  Gideon watched Baker’s chest rise and fall. He wondered how God or nature could form a man like that, capable of taking life so brutally, so casually. Baker did not look any different than someone you might meet on the street or in church. A plain face, but not a bad-looking one, with clean features and clear gray-blue eyes. What lay behind those eyes Gideon could not comprehend.

  His throat closed, and he let his own eyes shut. The grief was palpable and intense. These days it came on him often and without warning.

  They had buried David in the cemetery at Panther, near True’s cousin Emma, the girl whose skirts had caught fire during the making of apple butter. His son’s little body had been wrapped in cloth and placed in a small pine box that one of the jaybirds had made. In the grave David’s feet pointed east, so that on that final awful morn he would waken and behold the dawn, and rise up joyous, and ascend with the faithful to dwell in that place where pain and death were no more.

  Gideon asked himself how a body claimed by worms, tiny bones fallen to dust, could ever be put back together. How a dead child could rise again, new made. He wanted to believe that which he had always been taught: In God, all things are possible. He tried to keep his mind away from the abyss.

  The funeral service for David Burns Stoltz had taken place in the small Presbyterian cemetery on a fine late-autumn day. White puffy clouds proceeded in stately fashion across a brilliant blue sky. In his weakness, Gideon had needed a chair. He felt detached from the words that flowed so assuredly from the preacher’s mouth. True stood behind Gideon, her hands on his shoulders. He looked out at the broad valley in which the ironworks sat. Parts of the valley were bathed in sun, other portions were cloud-shadowed. The terrain showed its intricate form, its folds and gaps, its benches and flats. On one side Muncy Mountain stood with its gently rounded flanks and notched water gaps, and on the other side of the valley the little narrow hollows rose toward the long pale line of the Allegheny Front.

  He glanced upward again. The clouds were serene and solid-appearing, like sheep grazing placidly across the sky. By nightfall they would have dwindled and died away. People are like clouds, he thought. They seem substantial and important and long-lasting. Yet they are here for the briefest day, then gone.

  Doctor Beecham had said that he, True, and David had been among the first in Adamant to come down with the influenza, or, as some called it, la grippe. The malady had started earlier in Panther, and it had stricken True’s father, Davey Burns, who subsequently recovered and now stood here among the mourners at his namesake’s burying. The doctor said that, oddly enough, those hit hardest by the illness tended to be healthy adolescents and young adults; older folk seemed capable of shrugging it off. Infants and children were of course very susceptible. In Adamant, between forty and fifty souls had sickened so far, and almost half of them had died. The doctor believed it was pneumonia, developing in the wake of the influenza, that carried the victims off.

  A surprising number of people had come to David’s burying. Burnses in their multitudes, also various near and distant relatives. He saw the pretty freckle-faced Virginia Ross, True’s cousin who worked in the big house. Some people from church. And the headmaster. Horatio Foote had come up and clasped Gideon’s arms as he bent low his whiskered face, his pale blue eyes appearing somehow stern and full of sympathy at the same time. Foote hadn’t said a word, just kept hold of Gideon’s arms for a long moment and then gave them a squeeze before letting go. Gideon felt touched that the headmaster would leave his students and come all the way from Adamant for the burial of a child he had never met, a child whose father the headmaster barely knew.

  One face had been conspicuously absent. Although a member and a regular attendee of the Panther Presbyterian Church, whose minister conducted the funeral for the Stoltz baby, and although the aggrieved grandparents and the child’s uncles and aunts worked for him, Adonijah Thompson was not at the burying. Gideon thought it would have been strange indeed had the ironmaster appeared. Word had swept through Panther and Adamant that the Dutch Sheriff had caught the man suspected of murdering Yost Kepler—and brought back with him the body of another, more recent victim of the same killer, an old man with a white beard, a poor tramp who some said might be Nathaniel Thompson, the ironmaster’s brother.

  But how could that be? Nat Thompson had been dead and in his grave for thirty long years. Nat Thompson, killed by the hotheaded preacher Thomas McEwan, struck down with a maul and secretly buried at night in the garden of the parsonage—within sight of the graveyard where the sheriff’s baby boy was laid to rest.

  Gideon surface
d from his musings and was momentarily surprised to find himself seated in a chair in the jail, looking through a cell’s bars at George Baker. Baker lay on his cot and stared up at the ceiling. Gib Baker, Gideon reflected, must once have been an innocent child like his own little David. What had gone so terribly wrong? What miseries had this man endured such that he could take a life—two lives—so carelessly?

  He closed his eyes again. After his talk with Fish, he had come to the conclusion that Adonijah Thompson, with his great power and standing in the community, and the force of his personality—and probably his money—had pressured the state’s attorney into deciding not to investigate the old tramp’s killing. Unfortunately, Gideon could not even begin to figure out how such a thing could be proven. And about one matter, the Cold Fish had been undeniably correct: Gideon Stoltz was just a sheriff. He hadn’t even been elected, he’d been appointed to fill in for the real sheriff after Israel Payton had died.

  If only he had checked the ironmaster’s stable that morning over a week ago, and caught Baker there, and thus saved the old tramp’s life. If only he’d been able to find Nat Thompson alive and deliver him to Fish, present him as a witness to the strange and troubling events of 1805. If only he hadn’t needed to ride after Baker, first to Egypt Hollow and then to Chinclaclamoose. If only he’d been at home to help True when David became ill.

  So often did his thoughts go wandering along such useless trails, faint paths leading to barren, desert places.

  He wanted to return to order, clarity, peace. He wanted to get back to living, to being a husband and a father again. Yes, a father. He had told True, “Together we will make another baby.”

  He heard a tittering and opened his eyes. Henry Peebles, the assailant housed in the cell next to Baker’s, was laughing. Gib Baker swung his legs over the side of his cot and looked at Gideon with an expression that mingled astonishment and disgust.

  Gideon realized he had spoken those words out loud: “Together we will make another baby.” He started to chuckle himself. Then he began to laugh. It hurt his lungs, but he couldn’t stop. He sat back in the chair, roaring with laughter, his eyes filled with tears.

  A point of time, a moment’s space

  Removes me to that heav’nly place,

  Or shuts me up in hell

  Thirty-Four

  The next day, moving gingerly, he again placed a chair in the corridor outside Baker’s cell. The prisoner paced about for a few moments, looking off to one side, then the other, then above Gideon’s head, and then lay back down on his cot with his face turned toward the wall.

  Alonzo brought Gideon a mug of coffee. He had one for the prisoner, too, and called out to him, but Baker did not respond. Alonzo put the mug on the floor beside the bars and went away.

  Gideon took a sip. He screwed up his face. Alonzo made very weak coffee, hardly worth drinking.

  “That old tramp,” he said in Baker’s direction. “The one you stabbed to death in the logging camp. The other day they put him in the ground, up on Burying Hill. If you could look through that wall over there, and up the slope, you would see his grave.

  “I went and paid my respects. No one else bothered to go. Nobody read him a service. They just wrapped him in a shroud and lowered him down and shoveled the dirt back in.

  “The grave is unmarked for now, just a scar in the ground. But somebody really ought to put up a stone for that old man. Maybe I’ll do it. I will have them chisel into the gravestone ‘Nathaniel Thompson, 1778 to 1835, died in Egypt Hollow.’” He did not know Nat Thompson’s birth year; he knew very little about the man, other than the few things Gram Burns had told him and what Hiram Biddle had written down thirty years ago. “I don’t know if it would make sense to have anything like ‘A Christian gentleman of the finest character,’” Gideon said. “I suppose it could say ‘Called home by the Lord.’”

  He took a sip of coffee, swirled the mug, and looked at the muddy particles whirling within. “Ah. I have it now. ‘Here Nathaniel Thompson lies, for murder his blood for vengeance cries.’”

  Baker sprang up from the cot, startling Gideon so that he spilled his coffee. Baker gripped the bars of the cell. He said in a choking voice, “I don’t have to listen to your shit.”

  “You do have to listen,” Gideon said. “I guess you could plug up your ears with your fingers. But that would grow pretty tiresome after a while, wouldn’t it? So you may as well listen to the Dutch Sheriff while he bob’ls on.”

  Baker glared at Gideon. He turned, took a few steps, turned again, describing a small tight square with his pacing.

  “The judge here in Colerain County died not long ago,” Gideon said. “The president judge of the circuit neighboring us to the east will come here for the next quarter session. The state has decided to charge you with willful murder—murder in the first degree for purposely and unlawfully assaulting and inflicting grievous wounds on Yost Kepler, on the evening of October the twenty-sixth of this year, with those wounds resulted in his dying on the morning of October the twenty-eighth.

  “The county will provide you with an attorney. He will try to confuse things and mislead the jury like lawyers always do. But the men on the jury will not be fooled. They will find you guilty, and the judge will sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you are dead. The sentence will be carried out within the confines of the jail—that means in the yard out back.” Gideon indicated the wall at the end of the corridor with its single high window. “It won’t be a public spectacle, the way executions used to be. It will just be you, me, a few deputies, the state’s attorney, and twelve citizens as witnesses. A minister, if you want one. Also a doctor. After you stop kicking at the end of the rope, the doctor will check your pulse and pronounce you dead. It takes about ten minutes, or so I’m told. After you are dead, the doctor will take your body and cut it up—dissect it. Doctors like doing that. Especially the one we have here in Adamant.

  “Understand, I will get no pleasure out of hanging you. However, it is my duty as sheriff to see that your sentence is carried out.”

  “I didn’t kill that boy,” Baker said.

  “Witnesses will place you with Yost Kepler, sharing drinks in the House of Lords on the evening that Kepler was beaten. And kicked. Stomped to death, in an alley outside the saloon.” Gideon pointed at Baker’s stockinged feet. “My deputy took away your boots when he put you in the cell.”

  “Yeah. My fucking feet have been cold ever since.”

  “Yes, well. Your boots—the heel on the right boot has a big nick out of one corner. The coroner—the one who will cut you up when you are dead—he will testify that the bruises on Yost Kepler’s body match the size and shape of your boot’s heel. I also found the same kind of marks in the alley where you dumped the body.”

  “Nobody saw me do anything to him.”

  “Nobody needs to have seen you do anything. It’s funny, but I’m told that this kind of evidence usually does a better job of convincing a jury than eyewitness testimony. The jurymen get a chance to put two and two together, draw their own conclusions. They will learn about you buying Kepler drinks in the House of Lords, getting him drunk. His body found nearby, hidden under trash. Your boot heel with the nicked corner, the bruises all over his body, your tracks in the alley. Oh, I almost forgot. Yost Kepler’s watch, with his initials engraved on the lid, which we found with all that money in your girl’s room in Chinclaclamoose. The jury will take about ten minutes to find you guilty of murder in the first degree.

  “That’s just the first trial,” Gideon continued. “After you are convicted, you will be put on trial again, for murdering the old man.” Gideon reflected that he was getting good at lying. “Did you know the old man was the ironmaster’s brother? Maybe you were just told that he was someone who needed getting rid of. You were a tool—a dumb tool, like a hammer or a maul. You were paid to kill the old tramp. Whoever paid you didn’t care any more for you than a beat-up old hammer he might use once and then throw away in the
grass. Your girl put her mark on a statement setting forth things that you told her on the night after you killed the old man and fled back to Chinclaclamoose. She’s scared half to death. And horrified at what you did. She will appear in court as a witness for the commonwealth, and she will repeat under oath what you said about being paid two hundred dollars in gold eagles to ‘do a job for a big important man.’ The ironmaster paid you to kill that old tramp, didn’t he?”

  Baker sat down on his cot.

  “We found the gold and the watch in a sack in a wardrobe there in the girl’s room. She told me you promised to take her with you and go west. If you had ridden off right away, I doubt you would have been caught. Stupid of you, to spend the night in bed with her, and most of the next day. Well, I hope you had your fun. Where were you planning to go, anyway? Ohio? Illinois? The Missouri Territory? What were you going to do with that blood money? Piss it away drinking and gambling?”

  “Quit running your mouth, you Dutch blockhead. You got nothing on me. I never met that Dutch boy. I didn’t kill him or any old man, either. I was just going home when you tried to stop me. I didn’t know you were the law. I seen you blocking the road with your horse, maybe set to rob me. That’s why I ran. Did you see me kill that old man? Did you find a knife on me?”

  “How did you know he was killed with a knife?”

  “Your big-mouth deputy told me.”

  “Yes, that’s how the old man was murdered. He had thirteen stab wounds on his hands and arms, which he used to try to protect himself when you went after him. Once you got him down, you stabbed him four times in the lungs and three times through the muscle of the heart. The coroner says that any of those seven wounds would have been enough to kill him. Then you slit his throat. Even so, it took him a while to die, didn’t it? That explains why there was so much blood on the shirt and trousers of yours that we picked up off the floor in your girl’s room. No, I don’t think we need to find a knife.”