A Stranger Here Below

by Charles Fergus

  Baker lay down on the cot. His chest heaved.

  “You are in a tight spot,” Gideon said. And he figured he was, too. He had nothing to offer Baker for admitting his guilt and stating who had paid him to kill the old tramp. He had been ordered by a corrupt prosecutor to cease investigating the case. He didn’t see any way that he could get Baker to incriminate the ironmaster.

  ***

  True put clabber on the table that evening. It was a food she professed to love and one that repelled Gideon. Its lumpy curdled texture reminded him of puke. Its sour taste puckered his mouth. Back home, spoiled milk like this would be fed to the hogs. He spooned molasses onto it and tried to choke it down.

  True sat across from him, eating silently, her eyes downcast. The whole house was silent. It felt empty, with just the two of them in it.

  He pushed his bowl aside. “I miss him so much,” he said. “True, honey …”

  She swiped her hand across between them. “I don’t want to talk about it.” She shook her head. “I loved him too much.”

  “No, no. I just want to remember him. In a good way.”

  “All I can remember is the way he died.” She dropped her spoon and held her head in her hands. He reached across and put his hands on hers.

  “I did everything I could think of,” she said. “I dosed him with mint tea, I poulticed him again and again. Nothing helped.”

  “You did all you could.” And I was not there with him, as a father should be.

  “I should have gone for the doctor.”

  “That doctor couldn’t do a thing. A lot of people died from this. True, we’re not alone.”

  “I wish my gram had been here. She would have found some way to save him.”

  “Maybe,” Gideon said, “but I don’t think so.”

  “I put my trust in God,” True said. “He took my baby. He took David away from me.”

  “He was a good, sweet little boy.” Gideon wanted to say something hopeful. He couldn’t find the words. “I miss him so bad.”

  “I knew something would happen. That dream told me. I knew it, and I didn’t pay attention.” A tear ran down her cheek. “I listened to what you said. That dreams aren’t omens, that they don’t mean anything.” She opened her hands and wove her fingers into his. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not your fault.”

  He leaned across and kissed her. “It’s not your fault, either. You did everything you could. You were a wonderful mother to that little boy. You didn’t love him too much. You loved him just enough.” He stood, still holding her hand, and urged her up out of her chair. He led her to their bed.

  She sat down on it and stared at the floor. He kissed her again. He helped her undress. She began to weep. He caressed her, got her to lie down on the bed. He tried to be as gentle as he could. He thought that what they did could not be called making love. It was more like trying to assuage grief.

  Later, he got out of bed. He went outside and got the red setter—he still had a hard time thinking of the dog as “Old Dick”—and let him in to the kitchen. He built up the fire and sat before the flames. The dog lay on the floor next to his chair. Gideon ran his hand along the dog’s side, the ribs bump-bumping beneath his fingers.

  Since he had ridden to Chinclaclamoose, more rain had fallen. At times the rain would change to snow, which melted when the temperature rose and the rain recommenced. The hills looked sodden, as if they’d been dredged up from the bottom of the sea. Muddy pools stood in the harvested fields. Ducks swam in the pools, having left the streams and creeks, which ran fast and high against their banks.

  He had no desire to take the judge’s gun and dog and go hunting for grouse in the thickets or for ducks on the ponds.

  He would never take David hunting. Or hoist him up on his shoulders to watch a parade. Or teach him to saw a board or skip a stone across water or ride a horse. How many months would have to pass before his mind no longer went to his son a hundred times a day? What would it feel like to sit in front of the fire some evening and realize that all that day he had not thought of David even once?

  Gideon believed he had thought of his memmi every single day in the years since he had found her murdered. Not good thoughts, either. Mostly the awful scene of her body on the floor, bloody and dead. Or his imaginings of her killing.

  He went quietly in to the bedroom and reached under the bed where True slept. He slid out the heavy leather-covered case. In the kitchen he set the case on the table. He unbuckled the straps and lifted the lid. The smell of oil tickled his nose. Mixed with it was a hint of cigar smoke.

  An image of a lean, strong-jawed face came to his mind: the judge enjoying an after-dinner cigar as he cleaned and put away his beloved shotgun.

  Gideon assembled the Manton. He threw it to his shoulder and looked out over the graceful twinned barrels on whose oiled damascene surface the firelight danced.

  Seeing the gun, the red setter had gotten to his feet. He stretched and yawned, gave a little stuttering whine. He came and stood next to Gideon. He looked up, wagging his tail.

  “You think we’re going hunting, don’t you?” Canine optimism brought a smile to Gideon’s face. “In the dark? I don’t think so, hund. But we will. Someday soon, we will.”

  The coffin, earth and winding sheet

  Will soon your active limbs enclose

  Thirty-Five

  The moon, sinking behind the hills, cast up a pale glow. A breeze pushed thin silvery clouds across the sky. As Gideon trudged up Academy Hill, the moon’s glow faded and the stars became pure and ice-bright. He stopped and drew air into his lungs. The cold air started him coughing. The fit passed, and he stood and looked up at the heavens. When he was little, his dawdy had held him in his arms as together they looked up at die schtaerne. He remembered the raspy feel of his father’s cheek against his. Scents of dirt and hay on his coat. His quiet voice as he pointed out der Drache, der Rabe, the big sprawling constellation called der Grosser Baer, the Great Bear, just below der Naddschtann, the North Star—his father said that of all the animals, the Great Bear was the only one whose coat was thick enough to let it venture into the frozen realm of the north.

  It surprised him, finding that memory again after all these years. It told him his father hadn’t always been so angry and mean. He felt a pang at the love lost between them—and a deep sadness at the thought that his father, too, must have suffered terribly from the sudden, harrowing violation and killing of his wife.

  His eyes searched among the constellations, found the comet hanging there silent and aloof.

  Climbing, he had to stop several more times to catch his breath. The doctor had said it might be weeks or even months before he got his wind back. Dr. Beecham did not think the pneumonia had scarred Gideon’s lungs. But be careful, he had said. You have had a great shock. Give yourself time to heal.

  Gideon figured that time was something he did not now have much of.

  It was Wednesday, the seventeenth of November. This evening, the church would ring with shape-note harmony. He’d asked True if she wanted to attend, but her answer had been “Not yet.” And so Gideon had sent a boy to the academy with a letter asking whether he might come there this evening and meet with the headmaster. Gideon had received a hastily scribbled reply from Foote inviting him to come.

  He found Foote outside, bundled in a buffalo robe.

  “The comet has reached perihelion,” the headmaster said. “It is now as close to Earth as it will get. Soon it will sweep past our planet and return to the marches of the solar system. It will not return for three quarters of a century. Unless you live to a very ripe age, Sheriff Stoltz, you will never see Halley’s Comet again.”

  Gideon looked at the comet with its gauzy tail trailing back from the bright, solid-looking head. “It seems that scientists can explain comets, more or less,” he said, “but not some other things about the stars. It has always wondered me, why the night sky is so black. I’ve read that the universe goes on and on, that
it is filled with uncountable numbers of stars as bright as our sun. If there are so many stars, why do we see black spaces between them?”

  “I, too, have scratched my poor old pate about that,” Foote said. “My conclusion is this: We see, with our feeble eyes and our poor telescopes, into but a very small portion of the universe, some minuscule percentage of the whole. We don’t see the stars that lie at an unfathomable distance from the earth.

  “Here’s another question to tickle your brain,” the headmaster continued. “Are some of the stars we view already dead? Are they so remote that the light now reaching us was given off in the deep past, and the stars that we see are, in reality, no more than burnt-out husks?” He laid a hand on Gideon’s arm. “You should not linger in this chill listening to the cosmological theories of a scatter-brained academician. Let’s go inside. I’ll make us something hot to drink.”

  In the headmaster’s quarters, as Foote prepared tea, Gideon heard a chorus of shrill chirps apparently coming from the fire. Crossing the room, he found on the hearth several small boxes made of thin sheets of basswood folded ingeniously and capped with woven rush lids. From inside each box chirped a cricket.

  “Gryllus assimilis,” Foote said. “Common field crickets. I keep ’em caged so that Merlin and Morgan—my turtle and snake—cannot eat them. Alas, the poor fellows do not have much longer to sing. Or, more accurately, to stridulate. They produce that sound by scraping their wing covers together, although I’m sure you know that already.

  “Here.” He handed Gideon a steaming mug. “You will also recall that I have a more stalwart libation, if such is your fancy.”

  “I wanted to thank you for coming to my son’s burying.”

  “Not at all, not at all. I can’t imagine the grief that you and your wife must be feeling.”

  “Mr. Foote,” Gideon asked, “do you believe in an all-seeing God?”

  Foote’s brow knit. “Well, I might believe in a distracted God, an absent-minded one in some far corner of the universe. Or maybe a cross-grained old reprobate who doesn’t give a hoot for us here on Earth and would rather complain about his hernia or his ingrown toenail. But in fact I believe in none of those deities, or any other. A reverend minister, Mr. Donald Braefield—why, he is the very man who conducted the burial service for your child; he holds the pastorate at Panther—Donald calls me a ‘Nothingarian.’ He’s a good Christian who loves me in spite of my unbelief. He’s also an avid collector of odonates, the dragonflies and damselflies. Donald wields a swift net. Well. Gone off the rails again, haven’t I?” Foote gave his grating laugh and leaned forward in his chair. “Sheriff Stoltz, all godly thoughts aside: Were you able to identify the man who was stabbed to death?”

  Gideon shook his head. “I believe he was Nat Thompson. I am sure he was Nat Thompson. But there’s no evidence to prove it. No letters on his person, no monogrammed clothing, nothing like that.”

  “Have you learned anything from your prisoner?”

  “He maintains that he is innocent of all crimes.”

  “Do you interrogate him?”

  “I talk with him. I talk at him, mostly.” Gideon sipped his tea. “Maybe he will open up to me at some point. But I can’t offer him anything in exchange. He’s been charged with murder in the first degree for killing Yost Kepler—a willful, premeditated murder committed in the perpetration of a robbery.”

  “The evidence in that case, is it strong?”

  “It seems to me to be strong, even though it is circumstantial.”

  “Do you think he’ll be convicted?”

  “Mr. Fish says Baker will be convicted for killing Yost Kepler. That he will hang for it.” Gideon squirmed in the chair. “He also told me he will not put Baker on trial for killing the old man.”

  Foote’s eyebrows shot up.

  “He won’t even let me investigate.”

  “But …”

  “I think the ironmaster got to him,” Gideon said.

  “Bought him off.”

  “Or scared him.” Gideon described the evidence linking Baker to the old tramp: meeting him on the road near the logging camp where the tramp had been stabbed to death, Baker’s flight, his blood-stained clothing, the gold eagles in the sack, the sworn statement by the young woman Baker was with in Chinclaclamoose claiming he had told her he’d been paid to do a job for “a big important man.”

  “Is there anything to directly connect Adonijah Thompson with this assassin?”

  “Two men at the ironmaster’s stable told me Baker stayed there. Simpletons, I suppose you’d call them. They heard the ironmaster tell Baker to go find an old tramp in the logging camp at the head of Egypt Hollow. A camp that is owned by the ironworks.”

  Foote gave a low whistle. “And Fish won’t let you investigate.”

  “When I got back from Chinclaclamoose, I went down with the influenza and was out of my mind for a while. My deputy knew that the old man had appeared at the judge’s house on October 18. So he brought the judge’s housekeeper to the jail to view the corpse. Mrs. Leathers went there practically kicking and screaming, not wanting to lay eyes on another dead body. But she looked at the old man, and she said yes, it might be the tramp who had shown up at the judge’s house that evening.”

  Foote drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “‘Might be.’ That’s not exactly a positive identification. Nothing that would cause a grand jury to indict anyone.”

  “No,” Gideon said. “And anyway, Fish would never agree to convening a grand jury for this.”

  Foote and Gideon had finished their tea. It was not difficult for the headmaster to persuade Gideon to have some of the stronger stuff.

  As he sipped the whiskey, Gideon described the old tramp for Foote: his stature and build, similar to that of the headmaster; the length and cut of his beard; his wooden staff; and his clothing and hat, the latter adorned with a white buck tail. All of those personal items were under lock and key at the jail.

  “How well do you know the ironmaster?” Gideon asked Foote.

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever met the man.”

  “You’d remember it if you had. My wife told me the ironmaster says the law stops where his ironworks begins. I met him there in Panther one morning when I was hoping to arrest the man I knew then as George English. When I faced the ironmaster, I was afraid. But my wife tells me that Adonijah Thompson is not without fear himself. She says he’s terrified of spirits. Of ghosts.”

  Foote snorted. “You could say that about most of the people around here.”

  Gideon swallowed the rest of his drink. An idea had come to him. A wild idea. A dangerous plan. But it just might work.

  “Your friend, the Reverend Braefield,” he said. “The one who likes to catch dragonflies. Does he believe in the Ten Commandments?”

  “I assume so. He’s a preacher, ain’t he?”

  On the hearth the crickets chirped, their notes slower, fewer. They’re dying, Gideon thought. As we all are.

  Who is this that comes from far,

  With his garments dipped in blood?

  Thirty-Six

  “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: Who can know it?’ Word of the Lord, as told by the prophet Jeremiah, chapter seventeen, verse nine.”

  The Reverend Braefield had a booming voice for such a slender man. His eyes were large and set wide apart in his head. Gideon thought they made Braefield look a bit like a dragonfly himself.

  The preacher’s eyes, flitting about the sanctuary, seemed to momentarily find and bore into those of each and every congregant at the Panther Presbyterian Church.

  “The English dramatist John Webster writes that ‘Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out.’” The minister paused. “I am certain that all of us are reeling at the news of two murders in this county within the last month.” Again his gaze raked over the congregation. “Can you not hear the shrieks of those poor wronged souls? And can you not hear another shrieking, older and yet persist
ent, coming from the walls of this church, from the garden next to the parsonage—from the house where I, your pastor, make my home?”

  The minister clasped his hands behind his back and paced from one side of the pulpit to the other.

  “Murder is a grievous sin, whose severity and depravity are shown by God’s placing the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ at the head of the second table of Mosaic law. Committing murder burdens the mind with a heavy guilt, a guilt that grows harder to bear with each passing day—each month—each year.”

  Gideon had filed in with the last of the worshipers and taken a seat in back. By leaning forward, he could watch Adonijah Thompson, three rows in front of him and across the aisle. The ironmaster had placed his top hat on the pew next to him. No one sat close, out of either respect or fear. The ironmaster wore a fine frock coat whose dark gray color matched his hair, combed back and flowing down over his collar. Seen from the side, Thompson’s face appeared stern and unmoving.

  “The Bible says that each of us suffers from the sickness of a deceitful, wicked heart,” the Reverend Braefield said. “Into this condition we are born, and throughout our lives the evil in our souls causes us to do many things we know to be wrong. We bear false witness. We cheat and steal. We grow wrathful and fierce. We may even strike out violently against our fellow man and kill.

  “All of us are sinners. You are a sinner; I am a sinner. Make no mistake about it, a man of the cloth, a so-called man of God, can be as base and abject a sinner as any other. Such a one was the Reverend Thomas McEwan, who once preached from this very pulpit and who urged his fellow men and women to be pure in heart and soul and Godly in thought and conduct—when he himself was not.

  “Sinner that he was, McEwan fell upon a person, a man in his employ, and smote him with a maul. The attack took place outside the parsonage. I am sure the older members of the church recall McEwan’s act of violence, and some here would have witnessed the events that followed it—events that took place thirty years ago. Is that such a long time? No. Thirty years is but a fleeting blink before the all-seeing eye of the Lord.”