The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

by Elizabeth George

  The dogs were inching toward her, hackles flashing over their backs, taking their courage from each other, smelling the blood on her hands, her dress. She wished she’d brought a stick with her. She’d even forgotten her Bible this time, saw it in her mind’s eye as it lay splayed open on the porch with the wind paging it. She hadn’t eaten since they’d brought Clay back, and for a moment she thought she might faint.

  She stamped at the dogs and they stopped their approach but kept barking.

  In all, it must have been half an hour before Walker’s door finally opened, the dogs never having quit. She lowered her hand from her neck. The reverend came out fastening his suspenders and put a toothpick in his mouth. He looked up at the sky as if seeking rain. A man entirely bald of hair but with a long white beard and white eyebrows and small rifle-barrel eyes. He whistled at the dogs, but they ignored him and ignored him when he called them by name.

  She thought it proper for him to come down and meet her, but he never left the porch.

  “This how you treat white folks?” she croaked at him.

  “I know you,” he said. “Heard why you here too. And you might try tell me the Lord God, he expect me to forgive. But I been in there praying since you first step in my yard, Missus Freemont, since them dogs first start they racket, and I been intent on listen what God say. But he ain’t say nothing ’bout me saying no words over your boy soul. If he wanted me to, he’d a said so. Might be them dogs stop barking. That would tell me. The Lord, he ain’t never been shy ’bout telling me what to do and I ain’t never been shy for listening.”

  But she had turned away before he finished, and by the time the dogs stopped their noise she had rounded a curve and another curve and gone up a hill and then sat in the road and then lay in it.

  Lay in it thinking of her past life, of her farmer father, widowed and quick to punish, overburdened with his failing tobacco farm and seven children, she the second oldest and a dreamer of daydreams, possessed he said by the demon Sloth. Thinking of the narrow-shouldered, handsome man coming on horseback seemingly from between the round mountains she’d seen and not seen all her life, galloping she thought right down out of the broad purple sky onto her father’s property. The young man taking one look at her and campaigning and working and coercing and at last trading her father that fine black mare for a battered wagon, a pair of mules, and a thin eighteen-year-old wife glad to see someplace new. Of crossing steaming green Tennessee in the wagon, of clear cool rainless nights with the canvas top drawn aside, lying shoulder to shoulder with her husband, the sky huge and intense overhead, stars winking past on their distant, pretold trajectories, the mules braying down by the creek where they were staked and she falling asleep smelling their dying fire, his arms around her.

  E. J. Ezekiel Jeremiah. No living person knows what them letters stands for but you, he’d said.

  Ezekiel, she’d repeated. Jeremiah.

  Out of the wagon to jump across the state line (which he’d drawn in the dirt with his shoe), laughing, holding hands, and going south through so much Alabama she thought it must spread all the way from Heaven to Hell. Slate mountains gave way to flatland and swamp to red clay hills, and they ferried a wide river dead as glass, then bumped over dry stony roads atop the buckboard pulled by the two thinning mules. Then the oldest mule died: within two months of their wedding.

  E. J. not saying anything for a long time, staring at the carcass where it lay in the field, hands on his hips, his back to her; and then saying why the hell didn’t she tell him her daddy was trading a bum mule.

  For days and mostly in silence they paralleled a lonely railroad until it just stopped and there were nigger men hammering alongside white ones and the ring of metal on metal and tents speckling the horizon and octoroon whores hanging their stockings on what looked to be a traveling gallows.

  For two months he laid crossties and flirted (and more) with the whores. Then they departed on a Sunday at dawn when he was still drunk from the night. She had a high fever and from inside her hot lolling head it seemed they were slipping off the land, ever south into an ooze of mud.

  Then clabbertrap railroad or river towns on the landscape, she expecting a baby and sick each afternoon, staying with the wagon and reading in her Bible while he walked to town or rode aback the remaining mule to find a game of blackjack or stud and coming out more often than not with less money than he’d gone in with, her little dowry smaller and smaller and then things traded, the iron skillet from her grandmother for cornmeal and her uncle’s fiddle—which she could play a little—for cartridges. E. J. had begun to sleep with the pistol by his head and his arms around his coat, the wagon always covered at night now, as if he’d deny her the stars. Waking one morning to a world shelled in bright snow and that evening giving birth to the squalling boy they called Clay, after her father, who, despite herself, she missed.

  Where we going? she’d asked E. J., and he’d said, To a place I know of.

  Which, eventually, was here. The cabin that belonged to Travis Bolton. Who lived in a large house four miles away and who killed E. J. for a ham and then said she and Clay could stay on in the cabin if they wanted to, and not pay rent, and pick cotton for him when harvest time came.

  Some thoughtful part of her knew it was killing E. J. that had let Travis Bolton hear God’s call. That made him do whatever a man did, within his heart and without—papers, vows—to become a preacher of the gospel. She imagined him a man of extravagant gestures, who when he gave himself to Christ gave fully and so not only allowed her and her boy to work and live on his land, in his house, but did more. On the coldest days she might find a gutted doe laid across the fence at the edge of the property. Or a plucked turkey at Christmas. Not a week after E. J. had been committed to the earth by Brother Hill, a milk cow had shown up with the Bolton brand on it. She’d waited for Mr. Bolton or his hand Marcus Eady to come claim it, but after a day and a night no one had and so she’d sheltered it in the lean-to back of the house. Aware she could be called a thief, she’d wrapped Clay in E. J.’s coat (buckshot holes still in it) and carried him to the Bolton place. Instinct sent her to the back door, where a nigger woman eyed her down a broad nose and fetched Mrs. Bolton, who told her Mr. Bolton meant for her to use the cow so that the boy might have milk. Then she shut the door. Bess understood that Mrs. Bolton disapproved of her husband’s decision to let them live in the cabin. To let them pick cotton alongside the other hired hands and tenant farmers, to pay them for the work of two people even though she was a sorry picker at first and Clay did little work at all in his early years. Nights in the cabin’s bed with Clay asleep against her body, Bess imagined arguments between the Boltons, imagined them in such detail that she herself could hardly believe Mr. Bolton would let those people stay in their house, bleed them of milk and meat and money. Bess’s own father would never have let squatters settle in one of his tenant houses, had in fact run off families in worse shape than Bess’s. If you could call her and Clay a family.

  When she woke, she knew God had spoken to her through Jesus Christ. In a dream, he had appeared before her in the road with a new wagon and team of strong yellow oxen behind him, not moving, and he had knelt and pushed back the hair from her eyes and lifted her chin in his fingers. She couldn’t see his face for the sun was too bright, but she could look on his boots and did, fine dark leather stitched with gold thread and no dust to mar them. She heard him say, Walk, witness what man can do if I live in his heart.

  She rose, brushing away sand from her cheek, shaking sand from her dress, and started toward Coffeeville.

  She had walked for two hours talking softly to herself when she heard the wagon behind her and stepped from the road into the grass to give way to its berth. The driver, a tall man dressed in a suit, tie, and derby hat, whoaed the mules pulling it and touched the brim of the hat and looked at her with his head tilted. He glanced behind him in the wagon. Then he seemed to arrive at a kind of peace and smiled, said she looked give out, as
ked her would she like a ride to town. She thanked him and climbed in the back amid children, who frowned at one another at her presence, the haze of flies she’d grown used to. A young one asked was she going to the doctor.

  “No,” she said, “to church.”

  She slept despite the wagon’s bumpy ride and woke only when one of the children wiggled her toe.

  “We here,” the child said.

  Her neck felt better, but still she moved it cautiously when she turned toward the Coffeeville Methodist Church, a simple sturdy building painted white and with a row of tall windows along its side, the glasses raised, people sitting in them, their backs to the world, attention focused inside. In front of the building, buggies, horses, and mules stood shaded by pecan branches. Women in hats were unrolling blankets on the brown grass that sloped down to the graveyard, itself shaded by magnolias. From out of the windows she heard singing:

  Are you weak and heavy laden?

  Cumbered with a load of care?

  Precious Savior still our refuge,

  Take it to the Lord in prayer.

  The children parted around her and spilled from the wagon, as if glad to be freed of her. The man stood and set the brake, then climbed down. He had a cloth-covered dish in his hand. “Here we are,” he said, and put down his plate, which she could smell—fried chicken—and offered his hand. She took it, warm in hers, and the earth felt firm beneath her feet.

  Tipping his hat, he began to make his way through the maze of wagons and buggies and up the steps and inside. She stood waiting. The song ended and more women—too busy to see her—hurried out a side door carrying cakes, and several children ran laughing down the hill, some rolling in the grass, and from somewhere a dog barked.

  Two familiar men stepped out the front door, both dressed in dark suits and string ties. They began rolling cigarettes. When the young one noticed her he pointed with a match in his hand and the other looked and saw her too. They glanced at one another and began to talk, then Glaine Bolton hurried back inside. Marcus Eady stayed, watching her. His long gray hair swept back beneath his hat, his goatee combed to a point, and his cheeks shaved clean. He lit his cigarette, and trailing a hand along the wall, he moved slowly down the steps and off the side of the porch and along the building. When he got to his horse he stroked its mane and spoke softly to it, all the while watching her.

  The front door opened and the man who stepped out putting on his hat was Sheriff Waite, wearing a white shirt and thin black suspenders. He stood on the porch with his hands on his hips. She was holding on to the side of the wagon to keep from falling, and for a moment Waite seemed to stand beside his own twin, and then they blurred and she blinked them back into a single sheriff.

  He had seen her. He glanced over at Marcus Eady and patted the air with his hand to stay the man as he, Waite, came down the steps and through the wagons and buggies and horses and mules, laying his hands across the necks and rumps of the skittish animals nearest her to calm them. When he stood over her, bent as she was, she came only to his badge.

  “Missus Freemont,” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “My boy needs burying,” she said. “The Lord led me here.”

  For a moment, as he watched her, Waite held in his eyes a look that doubted that such a Lord existed anymore. What did he see in her face that made his own face both dreadful and aggrieved? What a sight she must be, bloodied, rank, listing up from the camp of the dead to here, the sunlit world of the living, framed in God’s view from the sky in startling white cotton. She clung to the wagon’s sideboard and felt her heart beat against it, confused for a moment which of her men it held. More people had come onto the porch in their black and white clothes and were watching, stepping down into the churchyard. A woman put her hand over her mouth. Another hid a child’s face. Marcus Eady had drawn his rifle and levered a round into its chamber. Glaine Bolton emerged red-faced from the church, pushing people aside, and pointed toward Bess and Waite, the sheriff reaching to steady her. The man last out was the preacher, Travis Bolton, and now she remembered why she had come. It was for her boy. It was for Clay. At the church Bolton raised his Bible above his eyes to shade them so he might see. Then he pushed aside the arm of his son trying to hold him back and left the boy frowning and came through the people, toward her.

  STEPHEN KING

  A Death

  FROM The New Yorker

  JIM TRUSDALE HAD a shack on the west side of his father’s gone-to-seed ranch, and that was where he was when Sheriff Barclay and half a dozen deputized townsmen found him, sitting in the one chair by the cold stove, wearing a dirty barn coat and reading an old issue of the Black Hills Pioneer by lantern light. Looking at it, anyway.

  Sheriff Barclay stood in the doorway, almost filling it up. He was holding his own lantern. “Come out of there, Jim, and do it with your hands up. I ain’t drawn my pistol and don’t want to.”

  Trusdale came out. He still had the newspaper in one of his raised hands. He stood there looking at the sheriff with his flat gray eyes. The sheriff looked back. So did the others, four on horseback and two on the seat of an old buckboard with HINES MORTUARY printed on the side in faded yellow letters.

  “I notice you ain’t asked why we’re here,” Sheriff Barclay said.

  “Why are you here, sheriff?”

  “Where is your hat, Jim?”

  Trusdale put the hand not holding the newspaper to his head as if to feel for his hat, which was a brown plainsman and not there.

  “In your place, is it?” the sheriff asked. A cold breeze kicked up, blowing the horses’ manes and flattening the grass in a wave that ran south.

  “No,” Trusdale said. “I don’t believe it is.”

  “Then where?”

  “I might have lost it.”

  “You need to get in the back of the wagon,” the sheriff said.

  “I don’t want to ride in no funeral hack,” Trusdale said. “That’s bad luck.”

  “You got bad luck all over,” one of the men said. “You’re painted in it. Get in.”

  Trusdale went to the back of the buckboard and climbed up. The breeze kicked again, harder, and he turned up the collar of his barn coat.

  The two men on the seat of the buckboard got down and stood either side of it. One drew his gun; the other did not. Trusdale knew their faces but not their names. They were town men. The sheriff and the other four went into his shack. One of them was Hines, the undertaker. They were in there for some time. They even opened the stove and dug through the ashes. At last they came out.

  “No hat,” Sheriff Barclay said. “And we would have seen it. That’s a damn big hat. Got anything to say about that?”

  “It’s too bad I lost it. My father gave it to me back when he was still right in the head.”

  “Where is it, then?”

  “Told you, I might have lost it. Or had it stoled. That might have happened too. Say, I was going to bed right soon.”

  “Never mind going to bed. You were in town this afternoon, weren’t you?”

  “Sure he was,” one of the men said, mounting up again. “I seen him myself. Wearing that hat too.”

  “Shut up, Dave,” Sheriff Barclay said. “Were you in town, Jim?”

  “Yes sir, I was,” Trusdale said.

  “In the Chuck-a-Luck?”

  “Yes sir, I was. I walked from here, and had two drinks, and then I walked home. I guess the Chuck-a-Luck’s where I lost my hat.”

  “That’s your story?”

  Trusdale looked up at the black November sky. “It’s the only story I got.”

  “Look at me, son.”

  Trusdale looked at him.

  “That’s your story?”

  “Told you, the only one I got,” Trusdale said, looking at him.

  Sheriff Barclay sighed. “All right, let’s go to town.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re arrested.”

  “Ain’t got a brain in his fuckin’ head,” one o
f the men remarked. “Makes his daddy look smart.”

  They went to town. It was four miles. Trusdale rode in the back of the mortuary wagon, shivering against the cold. Without turning around, the man holding the reins said, “Did you rape her as well as steal her dollar, you hound?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Trusdale said.

  The rest of the trip continued in silence except for the wind. In town, people lined the street. At first they were quiet. Then an old woman in a brown shawl ran after the funeral hack in a sort of limping hobble and spat at Trusdale. She missed, but there was a spatter of applause.

  At the jail, Sheriff Barclay helped Trusdale down from the wagon. The wind was brisk, and smelled of snow. Tumbleweeds blew straight down Main Street and toward the town water tower, where they piled up against a shakepole fence and rattled there.

  “Hang that baby-killer!” a man shouted, and someone threw a rock. It flew past Trusdale’s head and clattered on the board sidewalk.

  Sheriff Barclay turned and held up his lantern and surveyed the crowd that had gathered in front of the mercantile. “Don’t do that,” he said. “Don’t act foolish. This is in hand.”

  The sheriff took Trusdale through his office, holding him by his upper arm, and into the jail. There were two cells. Barclay led Trusdale into the one on the left. There was a bunk and a stool and a waste bucket. Trusdale made to sit down on the stool, and Barclay said, “No. Just stand there.”