Brother Micah scurried off back to the kitchen.
“What have you got for me?” Brother Jobe said, looking over his reading glasses, his voice returning to its lower business tone.
“It appears Mr. Einhorn’s chore boy saw Mrs. Stokes shaking her baby out on the street the night of the murders.”
“Yeah? What’s that mean?”
“Possibly that she shook him to death. Shaken baby syndrome. It’s well known. And consistent with Dr. Copeland’s autopsy report.”
Brother Jobe reflected while he sipped his jack.
“That ain’t good for your client.”
“Nope. But I’m bound by law to tell you in case you haven’t heard it yourself yet.”
“That boy’s a half-wit, ain’t he?”
“He’s Down syndrome, actually.”
“How’d this come to light?”
“A bunch was down at Einhorn’s store talking about the murders. The boy, Buddy, was around and he weighed in, so to speak, on something he saw out on the street that night. He lives in a room back of the store and he often sits outside at night, even in winter. You’re going to have to depose him.”
“Is he credible, this boy? I ain’t never deposed a half-wit.”
“He’s an adult. More or less functional. Reads and writes a little. Does some simple figures. I suppose the others would corroborate they heard what he said, though. It’s your call.”
“Well, I got some discovery for you too,” Brother Jobe said. Brother Micah came by the table with a pot of mint tea, a mug, a honey jar, and the basket of tidbits composed of deep-fried cornmeal and potato with a little dish of sweet red sauce to go with it. Brother Jobe took the first one, and several more. “I can’t get enough of these ding-danged things. This place was a pizza parlor for many a year, you know.”
“Oh, I know,” Sam said, pouring his tea.
“’Course you would. Well, we’re working on a pizza recipe. You know how hard it is to get wheat flour. And Bullock’s so durned stingy with that spelt he grows. Let’s face it, corn bread just don’t make much of a pizza.”
“Yes, we all miss real pizza,” Sam said. “You say you got some discovery for me?”
“The Stokes gal was in here the night of the murders.”
“I think we know that already.”
“Yeah, well, I got a boy was working in the kitchen that night, young Brother Enos, says he was taking a bucket of swill out back in the alley and caught Miz Stokes in a carnal congress with a town man in the box of the horse truck, baby all bundled up there beside it on the ground, crying all the while. It don’t make her look too good.”
Sam sipped his tea, ruminating.
Brother Jobe continued. “Enos can identify the fellow. Says he’s in here most nights since we opened. Farmhand over to Larmon’s. I’ll find and depose the sumbitch.”
Sam tried a tater tot. He was surprised how good it tasted, how forcefully the taste projected him into the past. The two men both foraged in the basket silently for several minutes.
“Ain’t they tasty?” Brother Jobe said.
“They’re quite good,” Sam said. “I have every intention of pleading Mrs. Stokes insane.”
“The burden of proof is on you-all,” Brother Jobe said.
“She was very sick, you know. The brain fever.”
“I do know.”
“She’s probably not competent to stand trial.”
“I intend to have that conversation with our magistrate, for what it’s worth,” Brother Jobe said, then knocked back the rest of his applejack. “It seems to me that Mr. Bullock’s in a hanging mood these days. Much as I think we need to see justice done around here—and just between the two of us, off the record—I don’t think hanging this poor girl is the right way to go.”
Thirty-three
Daniel finished eating and put his plate aside. The others—Loren, Jane Ann, Britney, and Robert—remained in their seats in the parlor, the warm air in the room fraught with dreadful expectation. Sarah sat at a remove in the inglenook across the room, practicing her handwriting with one of the manufactured pencils that had become increasingly scarce and valuable.
“Yeah, this part is hard,” Daniel said. “I apologize in advance.”
Jane Ann and Loren knew what that meant and shared a nervous glance.
Daniel’s Story: On Board the Kerry McKinney
We got to Buffalo by midafternoon. I figured they’d be looking for Randall McCoy’s mules as much as for us, so we abandoned them in a plowed field in what I suppose was once a city park. There was a statue on a granite pedestal that the farmer had plowed around. Evan had to go over and see who it was of. Grover Cleveland, it turned out, a long ago president. The corn was about as high as your ankle. We walked on from there. We’d left our packs and all our stuff behind on McCoy’s canal boat, of course, so we weren’t burdened by anything.
Buffalo was the biggest city I’d ever been in, but there wasn’t much of it left alive even once you got well into it. Most of the streets of houses appeared to be long abandoned, weeds and shrub trees growing in the old front yards, things hanging off everywhere, shutters, rain gutters, plastic siding, a lot of broken windows, hardly anyone around except some pickers going for the last scraps. The old business district with the tall buildings was vacant too. But closer to the lake you started to see some activity and some streets of close-together new wooden buildings, shoulder to shoulder, and finally a broad street on the waterfront with all kinds of businesses going.
There was a kind of man-made harbor there with a stone jetty that hooked around out about a quarter mile, and a lot of docks and slips with boats, the biggest sailboats I ever saw, and tall wooden structures along the shore where corn and grain that came in from far away across the other lakes were stored. There were lots of people, too, working around the docks, moving cargo on hand trucks and horse trucks, and an open-air market under a big wooden shed roof with farmers selling the first early crops, radishes and greens and mushrooms and cheeses and fishes, whatever they brought in. Evan and I had a stupid argument about whether the big water out there beyond the jetty was Lake Ontario or Lake Erie. It was Erie, of course. One thing amazed me: you couldn’t see across it.
We’d talked along the way about what we might do when we got to Buffalo, being a couple of desperate characters on the run, and I came up with the idea to buy a boat and just get the hell out of that part of the country to somewhere they wouldn’t even be looking for us. Evan went along with it. I admit, it seemed a little sketchy until we saw what was going on at the Buffalo lakefront and all of a sudden I was sure we really could do it.
There were two big new wooden hotels on Front Street, the Niagara and the Eagle. We agreed it would not be smart for us to go around being seen together since they’d be looking for a pair of desperados, so we decided to split up and each stay the night at a separate hotel. We agreed to meet up the next morning at the restaurant on the same street called O’Brian’s Meals and then just sail away, nice and easy. It was my job to go search around the docks for a suitable boat to buy because I was a year and a half older than Evan and supposedly I knew more about such things, which I didn’t, really. Anyway, there was only one sticky problem. I had to ask Evan to give me his share of the gold because I didn’t know yet how much I’d have to pay for a boat, but I figured it could be a lot. I didn’t even know what kind of a boat we would get, except it had to be something the two of us could handle.
In the meantime, Evan’s all upset about handing over his gold. He goes, “What if while we’re split up they capture you and take you in custody with all our money?”
I’m like, “I don’t know. If that happens, you better run like hell and hide out and maybe try to get back home.”
Evan’s like, “I’m not ready to go back home. But if I still
had my share of the gold, then I could buy a boat of my own and make a getaway.”
I’m like, “Hey, lookit, before you did anything you have to try to bust me out of jail.”
He goes, “I don’t even know where the jail is.”
“Well, I guess you could ask somebody, huh?”
“What! And risk getting captured busting you out? No way . . .”
I grab him by his shirt and drag him around the corner to a little alley between two buildings. I draw out the pistol and press it into his hand.
“Here, you take this,” I say. “If I get captured, use it to bust me out. And if they come after you, use it to save yourself.”
He just gawks at it in his hand like it’s the most amazing object he ever saw.
“Put it away, goddammit,” I tell him. “Tuck it in your pants and wear your shirt over it like I do.”
He does. Then he’s like, “It’s still loaded, right?”
“Of course it is,” I go. “So don’t take it out or mess around with it unless you’re in a serious jam, okay?”
He’s like, “Okay.”
“You trust me a little more with the money now?”
He’s like, “I guess so.”
I’m like, “You go get a room over there at the Niagara. You’ve got enough silver for that, I’m sure. Take a quiet dinner by yourself and don’t talk to any strangers. No girls either. Not tonight. You meet me at nine o’clock in the morning at that meals place over there and I will have a boat ready for us to sail away on.”
He goes, “What about food and stuff for the boat?”
“I’ll take care of that.”
“Don’t forget maps,” he says, and finally hands over all his share of the gold coins.
I was glad he mentioned maps because it hadn’t occurred to me. But I didn’t tell him that. I just go, “Of course.”
So that’s where we split up. I went down to the docks intent on finding a boat. There were about a dozen separate boatyards in that harbor aside from the public docks and slips. These were businesses that repaired boats, ones that built new ones, and others that outfitted them. I looked around at a lot of boats, trying to get an idea of what was on offer. The ones for sale all had signs on them saying, “Inquire at So-and-So’s office,” with no prices posted. I figured you had to go in and bargain over it. While poking around I kept my questions to a minimum so as not to show how little I knew about boats. I learned a lot just looking around.
There were many very pretty boats, some of them grand. Who doesn’t like sailboats? I began to look for how they were rigged to get a clue whether two men could handle them. Many were old-times boats, built just for the pleasure of sailing around to nowhere in particular for no good reason. They had hulls made out of plastic that you’d have a hard time fixing if anything happened to them, and they had complicated riggings and they didn’t have much room for cargoes. They were designed for a sleek look that didn’t have much practical value in these times. The idea began to form in my mind that we should have a boat that you could carry a lot of stuff on, like McCoy’s canal boat, but with sails, that we could go into business once we got somewhere far away enough to feel safe and where we could transport freight from one town to another. I went into several offices of the boatyard managers and inquired about boats and even started bargaining to get the feel. I’d make them pitch an opening price, even when they tried to goad me to make an offer first. We established that all prices were hard money and I did the arithmetic in my head.
It was getting to be evening when I found the boat for us. It was a broad-beamed, twenty-eight-foot long, nearly flat-bottomed cargo scow, all wood with leeboards instead of a keel or centerboard, what they called junk-type sails, light canvas with battens all through, easy for reefing in high winds, with a big sail forward and smaller in the rear, the stern, I learned to say, what Mr. Fourier, the boatyard owner, called a ketch rig. The hull was painted dark green with red trim. There was room below for four to sleep and a galley with an alcohol stove and a table bolted to the floor. The toilet was a little room with a steel basin that you had to take on deck and dump over the side. In the old times, Fourier said, they had machines that sucked all the nasty stuff out of a storage tank when you got into port, but nowadays it was just over the side with it. I was getting more and more interested in this boat. She was boxy and homely and looked pretty simple to run and I fell in love with her. Her name on the transom was Pearl, but I decided to rename her Kerry McKinney in honor of that girl I loved in Starkville who died of the cholera just before I left home.
Then Fourier and I got down to the haggle in his office, which was a nice room with maps and stuffed fish on the walls and big windows where you could see the evening sun hanging above the jetty. He seemed skeptical at first but eventually he understood that I meant business.
“What do you intend to do with her?” he asks.
I’m like, “Why, sail the great inland sea and carry some cargoes and have a life on the water.”
“It’s not such an easy life,” he says.
“I can always sell her if I get sick of it,” I say.
“I guess you can at that,” he goes. “Well, a hunnert fifty-five will do it.”
He meant ounces of silver. I jawed him down finally to a hundred forty.
“Will gold do?” I say.
His eyes bugged out. “If that’s alls you got,” he goes, twiddling his beard and chuckling.
Because of spending that time around Randall McCoy doing trade, I knew what the conversion was. We settled for six ounces. That left us with three half-ounce plus three tenth-of-an-ounce gold coins and a good bit of silver. We’d still be rich.
Fourier’s like, “Mind if I ask how a young dude such as yourself come into such a treasure?”
“My dad was a gold bug in the old times,” I say. “One of those ones that didn’t trust paper money.”
The others in the room all glanced at Robert Earle, who immediately said, “Well, that’s bullshit, of course.”
“It was just something I heard you talk about once long ago,” Daniel said, “the year the banks shut down.”
Anyway, Fourier says, “You’re a rich boy, then?”
I’m like, “Well, since you asked.”
He goes, “You look like a damn picker.”
I try not to appear insulted. Or nervous. I’m like, “It’s hard traveling these days.”
He’s like, “I assume you rode to Buffalo in comfort.”
I’m like, “Indeed I did, sir. And I aim to sell my horse here. Are you interested, by any chance, in a fine seven-year-old mare?” I’m bluffing of course.
“Nope,” he says and spits into a mug on the desk. “But you might try Arnold Fluke over to Genesee Street.”
I’m like, “Would you write that down along with a bill of sale for the Pearl?”
“Yessir,” Fourier says. “And for a change of clothes I recommend Salter’s Dry Goods right up there on Front Street.”
“Why, thank you,” I go. “I’ll stop there on my way to the hotel.”
He’s like, “Which one are you at?”
“The Eagle,” I tell him, foolishly, and immediately regret it. Suddenly this conversation is making me nauseous, despite the fact that I haven’t eaten anything since early morn, east of Lockport. I’m trying my damndest to sound breezy and cheerful after a long day of tribulations. “Is she ready to go, as is, the Pearl?” I ask. “I’d like to set sail tomorrow, late morning, let’s say.”
“She’s shipshape,” he says. “Turnkey, so to speak.”
He’s got a big framed map of the lake on the wall. I drift over to look at it and ask him where I can get some maps like it. He corrects me, “Charts, you mean?”
“Of course,” I go. “Charts.”
“I sell c
harts,” he says. “The Great Lakes series will run you two ounces of silver.”
I don’t aim to bargain over it. I just want to get the hell out of there. I’m like, “I’ll take the set. I’d like to study them in my room tonight.” So he pulls a bunch of these charts from a big flat file and ties them up in a roll with twine, then hands me the bill of sale for the boat and everything. We settle up. I give him a bunch of our gold. I’ve got plenty of coins left on me. I notice him hearing it all jingle in my pocket. I turn to leave, finally.
Fourier goes, “You plan to set sail by your lonely?”
“My cousin is meeting me here tomorrow morning.”
“Oh, where’s he from?”
I glance up at the map on the wall again. I can see the towns near the shore of Lake Erie. I go, “Down in Hamburg.” It’s a few miles south of Buffalo.
“You don’t say? I’m from Hamburg,” Fourier goes. “What’s his name, your cousin?”
“Uh, Perry Talisker,” I say. It just popped into my head, the name of that river rat we call the Hermit. I just figured nobody would know him, hundreds of miles from Union Grove.
“Don’t know any Taliskers,” he says. “You sure he’s from Hamburg, New York? It’s not much of a town anymore.”
I’m still fixed on the map. I go, “Perry, he just manages some family property there. He’s learning to farm.”
“What sort of farm?”
“Fruit,” I go. It was a wild guess based on what we saw in the vicinity coming west. Fourier takes it in, though. I can’t wait to get out of there. “The family’s actually from . . . East Aurora.” That’s another town I spot on the map.
“It used to be a rich town in the old times,” he says. “Doctors and lawyers. Is he a rich boy, too, your cousin?”
I turn around and look him straight in the eye and say, “I was taught it’s not polite to brag about such things. Especially now when times are so difficult for so many.”
A History of the Future Page 17
