“Just as he was finishing his supper and getting ready to clean his gun, the town constable came to the door with some terrible news. A young man named John Parker, a schoolmate of Aaron and Joe, had been found lying in the woods, shot dead. A farmer, an older man called Eleazer Stickles, had seen Joe follow the victim into the woods, and shortly afterward, he’d heard a shot. The constable smelled Joe’s gun barrel. ‘Recently fired,’ he said. ‘What load were you using?’ Joe said he’d been using buckshot. ‘To hunt crows?’ the constable said. Joe said he’d been hunting deer; he’d just happened to shoot the crows after it became obvious to him that he wasn’t going to see any deer; conditions were wrong. ‘Where are the crows?’ asked the constable. Joe said he hadn’t been able to find them. ‘John Parker had buckshot in his heart,’ the constable said. He arrested Joe and charged him with murder.
“John Parker had been a popular young fellow, good-looking and from a prosperous family. The town was convinced that Indian Joe had killed John Parker. Nobody would believe the story about the crows. They put Joe in chains. Aaron protested, but the constable said Joe might escape before they could hang him. Aaron went into the woods, looking for the dead crows. Joe had described the spot where he’d shot the crows, but Aaron could never find them. It was below zero for twenty straight days. Aaron went out at first light and came back after dark on every one of those days. He caught pneumonia, went into a delirium, and when he woke up a week later, they told him that they’d hanged Joe.
“The Hubbards buried Joe in the family graveyard, with a boulder for a headstone. Aaron, when he got better, went up there in the snow and carved Joe’s name on the stone and the word Misjudged. Aaron refused to go to church. He said the people praying in the church had murdered Joe. That remark was not easily forgiven, and it was never forgotten.
“In April, it began to thaw during the day while it froze at night, so they could sugar. They were setting the buckets—drilling holes in the trees so that they could pound in spouts and hang the buckets to collect the dripping sap. And as Aaron turned the drill stalk into one old double maple tree, he looked up and saw something black in the fork where the tree grew apart. He climbed up, and there, lying together, caught in a grapevine growing on the maple, were Joe’s two crows, full of buckshot. Aaron took them to the constable.
“The constable wouldn’t look at the crows. ‘First Joe had such fine eyesight that he could shoot two crows on the wing,’ he said. ‘But then he couldn’t find them. Now you bring me these carcasses and tell me that both birds fell out of the sky into the same maple tree, lodged in the same grapevine, and stayed there all winter without an owl or a wildcat or a raccoon touching them. Aaron, I know that you and Joe were friends. But go on back to your own house and stop bothering me.’
“Aaron put the dead crows in a box and took them to church on Sunday. He got there before the stove was lit, and waited, blowing out his breath in the freezing air, bundled up in his winter coat, sitting in a straight chair in the choir stall, his face to the pews, holding the box with the crows in it in his lap. He wasn’t dressed for the Sabbath, but wore his work clothes. Aaron’s lips didn’t move during the opening hymn and the Lord’s Prayer. While the others sang, Aaron’s eyes moved from face to face, and when they opened their eyes after the prayer they found him staring at them again. As the minister started to read the lesson, Aaron stood up and interrupted.
“ ‘I’ve got something to say to you,’ he said. Aaron opened the box and displayed the dead crows. He explained where he’d found the crows. He didn’t see a flicker of belief on any face in the congregation. Aaron realized that these people, many of them relations, all of them men and women he’d known all his life, could not possibly believe him. To believe that these were the crows that Joe had shot was to believe that Joe was innocent of the murder of John Parker. And to believe in Joe’s innocence was to confess that the town had hanged the Indian by mistake—or perhaps by something worse than a mistake. They ignored Aaron and went on with their service.
“The next Sunday, Aaron was back, sitting in his straight chair at the front of the church, wearing his barn clothes and his dirty boots, silent and accusing, staring at the worshippers in the pews. He came back the following Sunday, and every Sunday after that for twenty years. After a while, only visitors and children asked who Aaron was, sitting up there with his eyes glittering. The older people would tell the story, and that served to keep alive the memory of the hanging of Joe. That seemed to be enough for Aaron, though he never really made another friend in Mahican.
“A quarter of a century passed. Aaron took a wife, had children, grew gray. One January day, around dinner time, there came a knock at the door of the Harbor. Melody Stickles, Eleazer Stickles’s wife, stood on the threshold. Aaron didn’t know her at first. He hadn’t seen her since she was a girl. She’d been the town beauty, and every boy in school, including Aaron, had been in love with her when she was fourteen. But her family had been poor; her father had more or less sold her in marriage to Eleazer Stickles, a much older man. It was remembered in the town that Melody had cried at her own wedding, walking down the aisle on the arm of her father—he’d worn a dirty shirt, buttoned at the neck, and wide galluses with a red rose stuck in the buckle; no one ever left out that detail in telling the story, or how the tears flowed down Melody’s cheeks. She sobbed while speaking her marriage vows. After the wedding, Melody’s father went right out and bought a pair of fast coach horses, and she went home with Eleazer.
“On the day she called on Aaron at the Harbor, he hardly recognized her. He hadn’t seen her—no one had seen her, really—for twenty-five years. ‘Aaron,’ Melody said, standing in the open door, ‘Eleazer wants you to come to the house. He’s on his deathbed.’
“Eleazer Stickles’s ancestor had built a bigger house than was needful. Aaron had never been inside. What he saw when he did go through the door amazed him. Every room was stacked to the ceiling with fifty years’ accumulation of junk. Boxes, newspapers, magazines, old horse collars, jars, bottles—Eleazer was a miser. In all his life, he’d never thrown a thing away. He burned fallen twigs in the kitchen stove. Cats slept on the stove; it was lighted only to cook supper, and then not for very long.
“Melody led Aaron along a footpath among these mountains of trash, and let him into a room where Eleazer lay in bed. He was covered with blankets, with a tanned horsehide thrown over the top, hair side down. Still Eleazer shivered in his bed. It was below zero inside the house; the January wind howled in the eaves and bellowed down the cold chimneys. On the outside of the door of this room, Aaron had noticed a heavy iron bolt, extending all the way across the panels. It was like a dungeon lock. There were iron bars on every window.
“Eleazer, shuddering under his covers, peered at Aaron as he took in these details. ‘Curious, Aaron?’ he said.
“ ‘About what, Eleazer?’
“ ‘About them iron bars on the windows.’
“Eleazer looked around for Melody, but she had left the men alone in the barred room.
“ ‘I put the bars on this room the day that Indian Joe shot the crows,’ Eleazer said.
“ ‘The day he shot the crows?’ Aaron said.
“ ‘That’s right,’ Eleazer said. ‘I was out cutting timber that day. I broke a chain hauling out a big log and came on down to the house to fetch another chain, leaving the oxen in the woodlot. That’s when I heard Joe’s shot and saw the crows fall. Joe was standing in the clearing, reloading his gun. He never saw me. Joe was the best shot around in those days, wouldn’t you say?’
“ ‘Yes,’ said Aaron, ‘I’d say that about Joe.’
“ ‘Joe wasn’t sure where the birds fell, and he was still looking for them when I lost sight of him. I played a little trick on Joe on the way down the mountain, but I’ll come back to that. I kept my spare chains in the tool shed; the door to that shed is right beside the window to this room. As I put my hand on the door, I heard a bumping sound: bump, bump-bu
mp, bump-bump-bump-bump. Like that. Couldn’t place the sound. Melody was new then, we’d only been married a year or two, and I didn’t know her habits the way I do now. I thought she might be doing something I could tease her about, so I sneaked up to that window.’ Eleazer pointed to one of the barred windows.
“ ‘There was a good bit of sun that day,’ Eleazer said, ‘so I couldn’t see into the room without shading my eyes. I took off my hat to block out the sun and looked in. What I saw, Aaron, was Melody on the bed. She had her legs around a man. He had his boots against the footboard so that he could push at her better. The sound I’d heard was the headboard banging against the wall. I could tell by the way Melody was acting that this wasn’t the first time she and this fellow had banged that headboard against the wall. I watched till it was over and the fellow rolled over on his back. It was John Parker; Melody had always been sweet on him, though when I’d ask her she’d say no, no, she was never sweet on anybody. As soon as he got off her, she got on top of him. He was still wearing his boots. Neither one of them saw me.’
“Eleazer stopped speaking. Under that mound of covers, he looked small and wasted, but there was a feverish light in his eyes, as if the memory of his wife with another man gave him something to live for.
“ ‘What did you do then?’ Aaron asked.
“ ‘I got a shotgun, came right into the kitchen next door and took it off the wall. Them two never heard me over the banging of the headboard. Then I went up and waited on the cow path where it goes into the maples. It was two hours or more before John came up the path. When he did, I killed him. Then I came down and hitched Melody to the bed with a cow chain and a couple of padlocks and put the bars on the windows. Took me all night and most of the morning, but I got it done. This is Melody’s room. Until today, when I sent her over to the Harbor to fetch you, she never went out of it again except to cook for me in the kitchen, and you can be damn sure nobody else ever got in. That’s the story of the iron bars on the windows, Aaron.’
“Ten thousand times, Aaron had imagined learning the truth, and he’d always thought that when he did he would feel some overwhelming emotion. But for long moments, as he stood in silence, staring down at Eleazer on his deathbed, he felt nothing. The truth had been lying here all these years, while Aaron glared at the congregation on Sunday, and now he’d found it the way he’d found Joe’s crows—by accident.
“ ‘Eleazer,’ Aaron said, ‘what was the trick you played on Joe? Do you call killing John Parker a trick?’
“Eleazer said no, that wasn’t it. ‘The trick,’ said Eleazer, ‘was what I did to his crows. I found them, lying in a couple of juniper bushes. They’d fallen about twenty feet apart. I picked up the crows and tossed them up into an old double maple tree, just to tease Joe. That tree was way over on the edge of your land, Aaron, and I never could find it again. I didn’t hide the crows to trap Joe. When you found the crows I thought I was done for, I thought they’d ask how they got into the tree; it couldn’t be natural; somebody had to have slung them up into that maple. But the question never occurred to them. I figured they’d know who’d killed John—his body was on my land, Melody was chained to this bed, behind bars. I thought somebody would ask why I’d done that to her. I figured to hang for John Parker. And I would have, Aaron, if there’d been enough snow for John to have left tracks in and out of Melody’s bedroom.’
“ ‘You let Joe hang for you.’
“ ‘That’s right,’ said Eleazer. ‘You see how it was, Aaron. I wanted time with Melody, to teach her a lesson. That was the reason. I’ve had the time; I’ve got a lot to thank Joe for.’
“ ‘Are you going to tell this story to anybody else?’ Aaron asked.
“Eleazer stared at him. For an instant, the light came back into his dying eyes. ‘What story?’ Eleazer said. ‘You’re the closest kin I’ve got, second cousin once removed, Aaron, and if anybody wants to know why I called you over here, it was just to tell you good-bye.’
“Aaron never told anyone Eleazer’s story, either. He went back to the Harbor and wrote it all down in his account book. Then he climbed up to the cemetery on the mountain and carved the word Vindicated on Joe’s gravestone. He would never explain what he meant by that, and it wasn’t until somebody read his account book, fifty years after he died, that the truth was known. Aaron never set foot inside the church after he came home from the Stickles place. That told the town everything he wanted them to know.”
Above Falster, the northern lights had faded, and the punctual summer dawn began to bleach the horizon. “We’d better sail,” he said.
Mahican was pulling hard against her anchor cable in the moving tide. Paul helped his father put up the mainsail and take in the anchor. Away from land, there was a brisk wind, and the sea was rough. It was a long, hard beat back to Rügen with much tacking, and on the voyage home there was no time for talk.
Just before noon, the chalk cliffs of Rügen came into view, white in the gray weather. Paul took the tiller as they tacked into the harbor. Hubbard loosed the sheets as Paul put the helm over. As the boom swung over the cockpit, Lori and Paul ducked. Their faces were very close together and Lori kissed Paul on the cheek. The wind took the mainsail and it shuddered and snapped.
“Promise me something,” Lori said. “As you live your life, don’t be like Aaron. Don’t be silent. Don’t wait for the truth to wake up like some sleeping beauty. Make them listen to the truth.”
“All right.”
“No. This is important. Promise.”
“I promise, Mutti,” Paul said.
Lori nodded gravely, as if she had been relieved of a great worry. She went forward and stood beside Hubbard in the bow as the yawl approached its anchorage through flocks of raucous gulls. They wore matching yellow foul-weather jackets and when Hubbard put his arm around Lori, her slight body seemed to merge with his so that for a moment they formed a single figure. A drifting mist, low on the water, added to this illusion. Long after he had grown up, Paul remembered his parents as they were that morning.
— 3 —
That summer, life at Berwick changed. The Nazis had been in power for three years and they had had time to put their own people into the police and the local government even in a remote place like Rügen. The Buechelers were hardly aware of this: they had no contact with the police and the rest of officialdom. After the drab fallow season of the Weimar Republic, Germany under the new regime had blossomed out in uniforms and banners. Once again, the Germans were happy; the whole country seemed to exist in a daze of patriotic joy. In the beech forests on Rügen, youths marched under party banners, shattering the quiet with their singing. On weekends, the full-throated sound of them came through the open windows at Berwick.
“Government by operetta,” Lori said; “the Germans have a weakness for it.”
It was a minor annoyance. Just as they cared nothing for society, the Buechelers cared nothing for politics. They never read the newspapers. There was no radio at Berwick; Paulus and Hilde and Lori may have been the only people in Germany who, in 1936, had never heard Adolf Hitler’s voice.
There was nothing political in what Lori did on the terrace of the Kursaal Café in Putbus, the town on Rügen nearest to Berwick. She and Paul had gone into town to do some business, and afterward they had stopped at the café, a favorite place of theirs. It was midafternoon; the café was fairly full. When the waiter brought Lori’s coffee and Paul’s chocolate, he murmured something to Lori.
Swabbing his napkin over the spotless table, the waiter flicked a glance toward a pimply youth with a dead white face who sat alone a few tables away.
“Gestapo,” he whispered.
“A secret policeman?” Lori said. “Then why is he dressed like an actor?”
Except for a flowing white aviator’s scarf, the Gestapo man was dressed entirely in black: a closely fitted black leather coat, a black felt hat, black kid gloves. For some reason he wore riding breeches and black leather knee boots. He was dri
nking coffee with his gloves on and reading a dossier that he had extracted from a bulging, brand-new pigskin briefcase.
“He’s the new Gestapo chief for Rügen,” the waiter said. “He belongs to the new type.”
At this moment, a milk cart, loaded with rattling cans, came into sight. Under cover of its noise, the waiter let Lori in on Rügen’s new joke.
“His name,” the waiter said in a stronger voice, “is”—he grinned broadly and shielded his mouth with his napkin as he spoke—“Stutzer.”
“Stutzer?” Lori said. “That’s his real name—‘dandy’?”
Stutzer’s eyes were fixed on the milk cart. It was drawn by a dog and a peasant woman. It was a common sight in Rügen, and elsewhere in rural Germany, to see peasant women harnessed with a dog to a cart or yoked with an ox or a cow to a plow. This woman had heavy bare legs, chapped bright red. She was leaning into the harness, pulling hard to haul the load up a slight hill. Her husband, smoking a curved pipe, walked along ahead of the cart.
Stutzer wasn’t looking at the woman. He was gazing instead at a drunk who staggered along behind the cart, clowning. Everyone in Rügen knew the drunk; his name was Heinz and he had lost his mind in the war. In the buttonhole of his ragged coat he wore the ribbon of the Iron Cross, first class. Heinz came to the café every afternoon at coffee time to steal cream. The coffee came with little porcelain pitchers filled with cream. Heinz crouched on the pavement, watching the tables. As soon as a coffee drinker had taken as much cream as he wanted and put his pitcher down, Heinz would dart to the table, snatch the pitcher, and drink the teaspoonful of cream that was left. He made a kind of music-hall act out of his raid: watching for his chance with exaggerated craftiness, pouncing quickly, looking to left and right before he drank, then scuttling away to await another victim.
Stutzer the Dandy beckoned the waiter and ordered a second cup of coffee. While he waited for it to arrive, he went back to reading his dossiers; it seemed that he had lost interest in Heinz. Meanwhile, Heinz stole cream from two or three tables. As the Dandy’s coffee was served, he watched, licking his lips.
The Last Supper Page 5
