Slider’s Son

by Rebecca Fjelland Davis

  He traipsed back downstairs.

  Slider stood in the tiny living room, frowning. He was no longer holding his shirtsleeve over his nose. He took off his cap and scratched the back of his thick, sandy hair, and turned slowly in a circle. Grant got on his knees and checked under the davenport and the one worn-to-threads Queen Anne’s chair.

  Getting back to his feet, Grant said, “Can it be in the walls or something? Some critter crawled inside the wall and died?”

  “Maybe.” Slider’s face was like stone now. Grant couldn’t read it, but it gave him a knot in his stomach. Something was wrong here. Really wrong.

  In the kitchen, Slider lifted the flour-sack curtains, and they checked the sideboard shelves and behind the coal stove. Nothing. Slider even looked inside the stove.

  “Maybe something fell in their coal bin. You think?” Grant asked.

  “Where’s their coal bin?”

  “In the cellar. We gotta check the cellar.” Grant looked around. “Wait. Dad!”

  “There’s a cellar?”

  “Yeah. But . . . holy mackerel. Dad!”

  “What?”

  “Look.” Grant pointed at the floor. “There’s new linoleum since I was in here last time. The cellar stairs are right there.” Grant pointed in the corner by the pantry. “But they’re not there anymore. They’re covered up with a new floor. And how in tarnation would the Thorsons afford new linoleum?”

  Slider frowned again. He looked at Grant. “You absolutely sure?”

  Grant nodded. The knot in his stomach got tighter. How many times had he stood in this kitchen while Mary Thorson, Little Joe’s mom, made them iced tea with a mint leaf in it? “Yup. Positive.”

  “I guess we’d better get Will.”

  “It’s bad, huh?”

  Slider nodded.

  They stepped outside. Grant let his shirt fall from his nose and breathed deep.

  “I’m going to go get my car and some tools. You go run and see if Will’s at the office. Tell him to bring a claw hammer and a screwdriver. On the double. And, Grant? No need to mention this to anybody else yet. Understand?”

  Grant nodded, and took off running downtown to the Larkin County Courthouse. He took the alleys to avoid running into people who might ask what he was up to.

  He crossed Main Street. Sims, the grocery man, was standing outside his store, talking to Mr. Cleaver, the butcher. “Whoa, Granty, what’s the rush?” called Sims, but Grant just waved and kept running. He bolted up the cool marble stairs to the courthouse.

  Will Duff, the deputy sheriff, sat at his desk, writing in the big county ledger book. “Grant! Where’s the fire?” He smiled.

  “No fire. But something stinks to high heaven in Joe Thorson’s house. Dad wants you to come on the double.”

  Will’s smile drained in a split second. “Where’s Big Joe at?”

  “Away. Him and Mrs. Thorson and the kids left for Reservation Lake on Friday.”

  Less than five minutes later, Grant and Will pulled up to the Thorson house in Will’s pickup. Slider’s car was already parked out front.

  “Holy moly. You weren’t just a’kiddin’, were you?” Will said. “What in tarnation . . .”

  “Whatcha gonna do?” the Widow Larson asked again from her porch chair.

  “Guess we got to get to the bottom of this,” Slider said.

  “How?”

  This time Slider didn’t answer.

  At the back door, Slider handed Grant and Will bandanas to cover their noses and tied one over his own face. By the back door, he had set a saw and a screwdriver and two claw hammers. He handed one to Grant.

  In the corner of the kitchen, they started pulling nails out of Mary Thorson’s brand-new kitchen linoleum. When they were done with a big corner of the room where Grant said the cellar door was, Slider stuck a screwdriver under the linoleum and pried it up, trying not to rip it.

  Finally, after lots of screwdriver sliding and prying, it bent upward in a stiff tar-bottomed sheet, and the smell billowed up, even worse than when they had opened the back door, which Grant didn’t think was possible.

  Under the linoleum, exactly where Grant pointed out, was the trap door to the cellar. Slider grabbed the trapdoor ring and pulled. It didn’t budge. When they looked closer, the door had been nailed shut. Both men and Grant yanked nails until it was loose. Then Slider grabbed the ring again. He pulled and the door popped open.

  “I’ll be dad-gummed.” Slider stepped away from the hole in the floor and to the back door. “Come outside, son,” Slider said. Grant could hear him sucking in a deep breath.

  Will leaned over the opening, looked down, and followed Slider outside. Grant could hear Will retching, being sick.

  Before he obeyed his dad, Grant held his bandana tight across his mouth and nose and looked down the steep cellar stairs. At the bottom of the steps, in a giant dead heap, purple and black, swollen like a rotten sausage, and crawling with maggots, was Big Joe Thorson.

  Three

  A Murderer Among Us

  Grant staggered outside and leaned over in the grass just like Will had. The mashed potatoes and chicken that had tasted so good going in tasted pretty awful on the way out.

  The swollen, purple-and-black body crumpled at the bottom of the stairs floated in front of his eyes, no matter where he looked. Grant’s stomach kept churning, even when it was empty, but it was full of horror and some other dreadful feeling he didn’t want.

  Slider went to Widow Larson’s house to telephone the undertaker, Mr. Byrne, who owned Byrne’s Hardware, Furniture, and Funeral Home. All in one.

  “I’ll go get some more help,” Will said, and got into his pickup. “It might take more of us to get him up those stairs.”

  Big Joe, dead. Little Joe’s dad, dead. Grant’s stomach wouldn’t stop churning. How many times had he, Grant O’Grady, wished Big Joe Thorson dead? So many times that people might think Grant killed him. That gave Grant a chill in the middle of a sweltering afternoon.

  Lots of people hated Big Joe, that was for sure. But dead? Dead. Murdered. A swollen bag of maggots at the bottom of the stairs.

  The worst part was, Grant’s thoughts kept coming back to his best friend, his catcher. Little Joe. What was it Little Joe had said to Grant more than once? That if he could kill his dad and get away with it, he would? But it wasn’t possible. Not Little Joe . . .

  But who on earth would cover up the body with new linoleum? It seemed it had to be Little Joe or his mother. Nobody else would drag Big Joe into his own house or kill him in his own house and throw him in the basement. What about the scratched lock on the back door? Maybe Big Joe hadn’t gone along with the rest of the family and somebody had broken in and killed him. The Thorsons sure couldn’t afford linoleum, so maybe somebody killed him and tried to make it look like Little Joe or Mrs. Thorson did it? The whole town knew Mrs. Thorson and Little Joe had reason enough to get rid of the big, drunk oaf.

  It seemed a sure thing that somebody Grant knew had done this to Big Joe. Somebody who knew that the Thorson family was on vacation, that the house had a cellar, that nobody would find Big Joe ’til he stunk under the new linoleum. Grant’s stomach did flip-flops. He knew a murderer. That much was for sure.

  But worst of all, what if Little Joe had done it?

  It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t.

  Grant’s dad came back from the phone. Slider stood looking down the street, waiting for the hearse, and lit a cigarette.

  Neither Grant nor his dad said anything while they waited. Grant moved to stand closer to his dad and downwind, so he could inhale some smoke and smell something besides death.

  The sleek new black Chrysler hearse came up the road slowly so as not to raise any dust. Mr. Byrne pulled to a stop and stepped out.

  When Slider led him into the house, Grant followed.

  Mr. Byrne pulled a white hanky from his suitcoat pocket and held it over his nose while he took a long look into the cellar, then backed away. Outsid
e, he said, “I ain’t puttin’ that in my new hearse. I’ll never get the stink out of the upholstery.”

  “Mr. Byrne,” Slider said, “You don’t have much choice. I can’t throw him in the back of the sheriff’s car, now, can I? At least you can put him in a bag and try to contain the stench. You don’t want folks sayin’ you got that fancy new vehicle and it’s too good to haul their remains in, now, do you? What you want us to do? Haul him in Will’s pickup truck?”

  Mr. Byrne was a skinny man with slicked-back blond hair, or maybe hairs. Grant figured he could count the number of hairs slicked over Mr. Byrne’s head if he had a mind to, if he got close enough, but didn’t have a mind to get that close to Mr. Byrne. Anybody who would want to deal with dead bodies for a living gave him the creeps.

  Byrne stood on one foot, then the other, adjusting the hanky covering his nose as if it might work better in a different position. “Let me go get some more equipment. You hear?”

  “I’ll go with you,” Slider said, and Grant could almost feel the words Slider didn’t say: To make sure you come back. Slider got into the front seat of the hearse with Mr. Byrne. “You stick around here, Grant. Stay put and keep an eye out. Will’ll be back soon with more help. Don’t need the town comin’ in to gawk at Big Joe’s maggoty remains if the word gets out. I reckon’ Widow Larson has been on the phone non-stop. Only reason she’s not out here gawkin’. Hear?”

  Grant nodded.

  Grant sat on the edge of the scraggy grass with his feet on the dirt road, to stay put like Slider asked, but still be as far away as possible from that house full of rotten-corpse smell. He heard Widow Larson close her screen door and settle into her wooden chair to watch the rest of the proceedings. But Grant didn’t look at her. He didn’t want to talk.

  While he waited for Mr. Byrne and his dad and Will, Grant stretched his memory back to last winter, and started combing through everything that had happened, trying to remember every single person he had heard threaten to kill Big Joe. He thought all the way back to December.

  Part Two

  What Happened Before

  December 1936

  Four

  December 1936: Coal Train

  Grant jammed his woolen hat on his head, thrust his hands into his mittens and ran for the door. “Mom! I’m leaving now.”

  “You be careful, Granty,” Mamie called from the kitchen. She stepped into the hall and touched his cheek with the backs of her fingers. “You be safe now. Hope you bring home lots.”

  “I will, Mom.” Grant pulled the front door closed behind him. More snow had fallen in the afternoon while he was at school, cloaking the yards and fields around town with a new eight-inch layer. He pulled his steel runner sled from the tool shed, shoved the door shut with his heel, and took off at a trot, dragging the sled by its rope.

  In the street, the snow lay thick and icy underfoot. No one had cleared the new-fallen snow, but cars, trucks, horses, sleigh runners, and wagon wheels had packed it hard.

  Grant turned south on Main Street just as the Episcopal Church bell tower bonged once. 4:30. Vespers. He’d better shake a leg to make it to the train on time.

  Mr. Sims was sweeping snow away from the front door of his grocery store. “Halloo, Grant!” Sims called.

  Grant waved and kept moving. He passed Martin’s Dry Goods, Mandan Mercantile, and Cleaver’s Butcher Shop. Grant caught a whiff of jerky and sausage spices. His stomach growled, but he didn’t have time to linger.

  Grant passed the white clapboard Lutheran church at the end of Main Street. Then he crossed South Road, waded through the deep snow in the ditch, and pulled his sled up the embankment onto the railroad track.

  Grant took off trotting along the snow-slick railroad tracks. He scanned the horizon for signs of the approaching coal train. It was risky to take his eyes off the tracks, though, because in those few seconds, he slipped between two railroad ties and stumbled. He went down on one knee and hit his elbow on the rail but scrambled back up. His elbow stung. His baseball pitching elbow. But it was nothing. He shook it off and kept running, his sled bouncing along behind him.

  He passed the monolithic Larkin Grain Elevator and the last house on the outskirts of Larkin. Here, the wind swept across the wide-open North Dakota prairie and straight into his face. The temperature hovered a few degrees above zero, but the wind made it feel even colder. He put his head down and jogged the rest of the way to the water tank tower.

  His friends, all with sleds, hunched against the cold and crowded around the base of the tank tower, waited for the train.

  “There!” Little Joe Thorson yelled. Joe had climbed up the lowest wooden rungs of the water tower struts and pointed toward the horizon. They all turned their heads. Half the sun glowed like a bubble of orange juice sitting on the western edge of the earth with stripes of pink and lavender streaked above it. A horizontal ribbon of smoke hung in front of the sunset, frozen in the cold air over the train track. A few seconds later, they could hear the distant chug.

  Then the train whistle blasted, shattering the brittle, frozen air.

  Grant counted. Seven boys out here, plus Lorraine Woods. She was the only girl who ever came on these missions. It was a boy’s job, but Lorraine had no brothers, and she was the oldest girl in her family, so the task fell to her. Last year, her dad had hopped a freight train west to try to find work building the Hoover Dam. Since then, Lorraine’s mother got a money order once in a while. The newspapers said the dam had opened, so Grant figured Lorraine secretly hoped the train coming east would bring her dad home. No luck as of yet on that score. The other boys, including Orland and Sammy besides Little Joe, stood in a half-circle around Lorraine, whose long brown braids hung down her back from under her wool cap. All the kids beat their hands against their thighs and blew into their mittens while they waited for the train.

  Again, the shrill whistle rang through the early dusk. The force of the great black steam engine, with its roar and clang and whistle, and the shimmering heat it generated, punched a giant hole in the crystal North Dakota air as it pulled toward the water tank.

  Pistons hammered the big iron wheels of the engine. As the engine slowed with screaming brakes, the engineer waved to the boys and Lorraine, and pulled the whistle cord again. This close, the whistle was an iron shriek that blasted their eardrums.

  The kids all clapped their mittens over their ears and scattered in a line along the tracks, spread out a train car’s length away from each other. Waiting for the train to thunder and screech to a halt, they stood, beating their mittened hands against their coats to keep the blood circulating.

  The train brakes screeched and banged as the brakeman on top of the train, like a black paper cut-out against the sunset, jumped from car to car, turning brake wheels. The coal in the open gondola cars was dusted with snow, and the brakeman slipped twice as he jumped. Grant caught his breath, afraid the brakeman would go sliding off the coal car and land under the train’s great iron wheels. He wouldn’t be the first brakeman to be cut in two on a railroad rail.

  But the brakeman kept his footing and his balance. The brakes shrieked, and the engine lurched to a stop beside the water tank tower. The cars banged as each coupler stopped the car behind it.

  The yardman came striding out of the station house, cutting the early darkness with his swinging oil lantern. “You boys stay outta the way!” he yelled. He set down his lantern and grabbed the thick rope attached to the arm that swung out from the water tank over the train. The water tank tower was shorter than the city water tower, just tall enough so the bottom of the huge wooden tank was higher than the steam engine. The train always stopped in Larkin to fill up with water, so the engine could generate enough steam to haul the coal the next leg of the journey across the rest of North Dakota, to Fargo, and then on to Minneapolis.

  The moment the coal train came to a full stop, each boy charged the ladder on the car right in front of him.

  Grant jumped and grabbed a rung of the iron la
dder that hung down the side of the third gondola car. He swung his feet to catch the bottom rung and pulled himself up. He climbed, hand over hand, feet propelling him fast as a cat to the top of the coal-heaped car. Little Joe clamored up the ladder of the next car, Orland the one beyond. When they reached the top, they started kicking raw coal—lignite chunks and slabs—off the top of the car to the ground below. The lignite shattered and cracked as it landed. Some of the slabs were so big they couldn’t be budged. Some, Grant shoved off with his mittens. The boys and Lorraine kicked and kicked and shoved. Landing on the frozen ground, the slabs of coal sounded like gunshots all up and down the tracks.

  A whoosh from the engine sent a cloud of steam rolling over the boys. They ducked, even though the heat felt good. The yardman and the fireman from the train had opened the canvas spigot at the end of the water tower arm, and as cold water rushed into the hot boiler tank, steam enveloped the whole train.

  With as much lignite on the ground as they would be able to pile on their sleds, the boys and Lorraine climbed back down. In the steam, the iron ladders were slippery. Little Joe slipped off his bottom rung and fell face-down in the icy snow.

  “You all right?” Orland hollered from the next coal car back.

  “Yeah. Drat it all.” Joe jumped up and brushed snow from his face and the front of his trousers.

  The brakeman, now on the ground, had lit another kerosene lamp and came walking along the train.

  Grant jumped back, afraid the man would yell at them for stealing coal.

  “You okay, kid?” the brakeman asked, holding up his lamp. Little Joe ducked his face away from the bright glare but not before Grant saw a glistening black eye and swollen cheek.

  “For Pete’s sake, kid, you get that shiner fallin’ off the train?” the brakeman said.

  “Uh—” Little Joe touched his face with his thin mitten. “Uh, yeah.”